Development Architect - Product Processes & Solutions; PP&S

AI Architect

At SAP, we keep it simple: you bring your best to us, and we'll bring out the best in you. We're builders touching over 20 industries and 80% of global commerce, and we need your unique talents to help shape what's next. The work is challenging – but it matters. You'll find a place where you can be yourself, prioritize your wellbeing, and truly belong.

What's in it for you? Constant learning, skill growth, great benefits, and a team that wants you to grow and succeed.

The AI Architect is the technical backbone of PP&S's AI capability – defining how AI is built, governed, and scaled across SAP's Innovate-to-Operate lifecycle (engineering, support, cloud operations). PP&S is running dozens of AI initiatives across engineering, support, and cloud operations. Without the right technical spine, that becomes fragmentation – redundant solutions, inconsistent patterns, compounding technical debt. This role is that spine: the person who sets the architecture standards, controls the tooling decisions, and ensures AI investments stack rather than scatter across the portfolio.

The AI Architect sits in the I2O Cross Capabilities function and works in close partnership with the AI Engagement Lead, who owns stakeholder relationships and adoption. The AI Architect collaborates closely with architects embedded in PP&S's delivery units, providing the end-to-end architecture guidance that unit-level architects build from.

Key activities include defining and governing the I2O AI reference architecture, owning the end-to-end AI reference architecture across PP&S's three delivery areas (Engineering & Technology, Solution Support, Cloud Operations), setting integration patterns, tooling evaluation standards, and reuse frameworks, providing architectural input to tool and platform decisions, maintaining the central tooling registry in partnership with Enterprise Architecture, producing architecture decision records and technical standards teams are expected to follow, leading PP&S data strategy for AI, identifying, structuring, and governing the data assets that underpin I2O AI use cases, resolving data access and quality issues across CPIT, Finance, HR, and PP&S delivery areas, ensuring data architecture is fit for purpose, anchoring technical quality across the AI portfolio, evaluating new AI technologies and frameworks, establishing viability of new approaches through proof-of-concept work alongside engineering teams, and providing architecture guidance to the AI analytics and reporting infrastructure that tracks adoption and efficiency gains across I2O.

What you bring:

University degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Information Systems; master's preferred. 8+ years in solution architecture, AI/ML engineering, or technical program delivery – with at least 3 years in an explicit architecture role in an enterprise context. Hands-on experience with SAP's AI stack: SAP BTP, AI Core, Business Data Cloud (BDC), MCP Servers – you have built with these, not just advised on them.

Strong command of modern AI/LLM patterns: RAG pipelines, prompt engineering, agentic frameworks (e.g., ReAct), and LLM orchestration – you can evaluate and challenge implementation decisions, not just describe them. Proficiency in Python for prototyping, evaluation, and hands-on PoC work alongside engineering teams. Proven experience defining and owning architecture in large-scale, multi-stakeholder environments. You can hold a standard under organizational and political pressure.

Excellent documentation skills. Architecture decision records are a core deliverable, not a side task. Comfortable engaging senior business and IT stakeholders; able to translate between technical depth and organizational complexity. Fluent English;
German is a plus.