Expert AI & Cloud Development Architect – Office of the CTO

We help the world run better 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.

Summary As an Expert Cloud Development Architect, you will play a pivotal role in shaping SAP’s future architecture strategy in alignment with our AI first and Suite first product direction. Reporting directly to the Head of Architecture (US), you will serve as a deep technical expert, driving innovation across SAP’s portfolio by designing and enabling next-generation, cloud-native, and AI-integrated architectures.

You will work in a global, cross-functional setup and engage with strategic architecture topics that influence platform evolution, product strategy, and customer outcomes. With your technical depth and hands-on attitude, you will help ensure our solutions are scalable, intelligent, secure, and future-ready.

Key Responsibilities

• Own end-to-end architecture for multi-tenant, high-throughput, low-latency cloud-native systems.
• Define reference architectures, guardrails, and engineering standards for microservices and data platforms.
• Lead technical design reviews, and mentor senior engineers and tech leads.
• Architect and evolve Kubernetes-based platforms, service meshes, and API gateways.
• Set API strategy and governance (versioning, backward compatibility, observability, security).
• Select and govern data stores, design for scalability, availability, and data consistency.
• Establish observability-by-design (metrics, logs, traces) and SRE practices (SLIs/SLOs, error budgets).
• Lead performance engineering, capacity planning, chaos testing, and cost optimization (Fin Ops).
• Security-by-design: threat modeling, zero trust, mTLS, secure SDLC
• Evaluate run proofs-of-concepts, and guide roadmap/technology strategy.
• Partner across org to meet product strategies, goals and compliance requirements
• Technical leadership: setting standards/guardrails, conducting ADRs/RFCs, mentoring and cross-org influence

Core Technologies

• Cloud: deep expertise in one major cloud (AWS/GCP/Azure) across compute, networking, storage, IAM; multi-AZ/region patterns
• Containers & orchestration:
  Docker;
  Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS); autoscaling
• Service connectivity: service mesh (Istio/Linkerd), Envoy; API gateways/ingress (
• APIs: REST and gRPC;
  OpenAPI/Protobuf; versioning and backward compatibility
• Data stores:
  PostgreSQL/MySQL;
  No
  
  SQL (DynamoDB/CosmosDB/Cassandra/MongoDB); caching (Redis); search (Elasticsearch/Open Search); object storage (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
• Streaming & messaging:
  Kafka/Pulsar/Kinesis/Pub/Sub; queues (SQS/RabbitMQ)
• Observability stack:
  Open Telemetry;
  Prometheus/Grafana;
  Jaeger/Zipkin/Tempo; centralized logging (ELK/Open Search)
• CI/CD & IaC:
  Git Hub Actions/Git Lab CI/Jenkins;
  Git Ops (Argo CD/Flux);
  Terraform/Pulumi;
  Packer; feature flags; blue/green and canary deploys
• Languages:
  
  proficiency in one or more of Go, Java/Kotlin (Spring Boot/Quarkus), or C#/.NET; scripting with Python/Node.js as needed; testing including contract tests
• Having knowledge of SAP technologies is considered an added benefit.

Minimum Qualifications

• 12+ years in software engineering with 5+ years architecting & building cloud-native distributed systems at scale.
• Production experience on one or more major clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and Kubernetes.
• Proven delivery of multi-region, highly available systems with clear reliability and security outcomes.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems (consistency, partitioning, failure modes, resiliency patterns).
• Excellent communication and leadership skills, influencing at executive and team levels.

ABOUT THE TEAM:
The CTO area’s mission is to future proof our customers and SAP. Together we evolve SAP’s technology strategy and North Star architecture, explore the impact of emerging technologies on SAP’s portfolio and leverage the…