Principal AI Developer, Industry AI

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.

This a hybrid role based out of Palo Alto. Hybrid is 3 days a week onite, 2 days a week remote. The Office of the CTO (oCTO) for Industry AI sits at the intersection of the SAP Business AI Platform (BAIP), Industry Product & Engineering, the LoB application teams, and the FDE engagements with strategic customers. The Engineering team inside oCTO does not own product roadmaps for any single industry or LoB that lives with the product and engineering organizations.

What we build is the AI-native and agentic software that turns the Industry AI compounding loop into working systems. The pipelines that ingest customer data into ontologies and knowledge graphs, the harnesses that train and evaluate decision and foundation models, and the agents the IAI Data Labs and Agent Factory ship into production. If a customer trusts an agent to act on their operations, it is because someone built it to be correct, fast, and observable.

As Principal AI Developer, you are the senior hands-on engineer who builds that software end-to-end. You own the design and implementation of complex AI-native and agentic systems within one or more capability areas. You set the engineering bar through the code you write and the reviews you run, and you turn ambiguous problems into shipped, production-grade capabilities. This is a deep individual-contributor role: you write the hardest code, you make the technical calls on one's own, and you are the engineer other engineers elevate to — while raising the craft of the developers around you.

In this role you will:

• Design and build AI-native and agentic systems end-to-end. From data ingestion and knowledge-graph construction through model integration, agent orchestration, and production serving. As the senior implementing engineer, not just the reviewer.
• Own the hardest engineering problems in your capability area: decompose ambiguous requirements into sound designs, prototype quickly, and drive them through to production-grade, well-tested code.
• Build the agentic layer. Implement multi-agent orchestration, tool and function calling, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), context, and memory engineering. As well as the guardrails that keep agents safe and reliable in production.
• Integrate LLMs and ML models into enterprise systems — inference infrastructure, prompt and context pipelines, evaluation harnesses, and observability — grounded in what actually ships reliably at scale.
• Practice specification-driven engineering. Write precise technical specs, validate designs against architectural guardrails. Hold the quality bar through implementation and code review.
• Build the evaluation and observability that make AI systems credibility: eval suites, trace capture, regression harnesses, and the automated tests that catch drift and behavioral regressions before customers do.
• Turn one-off solutions from FDE engagements into reusable, documented libraries and services that other Industry AI engineering teams can adopt — code the whole organization builds on.
• Feed the compounding loop from the engineering side: ensure production signal, traces, and incident learnings flow back into the harness, the eval suites, and the codebase so the systems get better between releases.
• Contribute concrete…