Principal AI Engineer​/Architect at AI CoE

Principal AI Engineer / Architect at AI CoE (f/m/d)

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.

What you’ll do

Summary: We are looking for a Principal AI Engineer / AI Architect who can drive enterprise‑grade Agentic

AI development and lead our engineering scrum teams as technical artifact owner overseeing multiple development streams as well as foundational agentic

AI solution‑and software architecture decisions. The candidate will have proven and industry‑leading skills in Data Science and Data Engineering as well as Software Engineering and Solution Architecture, with an entrepreneurial spirit to join our diverse team and work on innovation projects as well as exceptional leadership and people skills.

Role: In this role you drive, oversee and are responsible for the entire development lifecycle of multiple (agentic) AI services, from Data Science PoC to productization and production operations.

You own and evolve best practices to impact the AI software quality of many teams which requires you to be able to quickly abstract and evolve concepts around AI software productization that play a pivot role across multiple development scrum teams. This also requires people leadership on a technical level and the ability to properly explain highly complex AI best practices to a team of practitioners and developers such that they can apply them.

You are very experienced with general software engineering best practices and enterprise‑grade code development applied to an AI space. Concretely this means that next to having profound AI modeling expertise, you are exceptional at working with vast amounts of data in a Big Data setup, professional Data Engineering Pipeline development as well as model deployment/serving and CI/CD setup. To fully understand our stakeholders' problems and challenges a solid business acumen is needed as well.

As a development leader you can motivate and guide a scrum team through complex tasks with tight deadlines.

Responsibilities / Core Tasks:

• Lead develop AI services from PoC to Production
• Lead the development of a best practice framework for AI development (both narrow and GenAI) for all dev streams and teams
• Lead the definition, evolution and drive the setup of infrastructure architecture for the AI applications we are building
• Setup and develop new Big Data pipelines, to productize data ETL workloads for different AI services.
• Develop AI/ML models to solve real life business problems (this includes Data Science exploration phase as well as model productizationli>
• Work with stakeholders throughout the organization to identify opportunities for leveraging company data to drive business solutions.
• Productionize AI PoCs with good software engineering by incorporating CI/CD pipelines, deployment and MLOps.
• Take ownership over AI services in development and production
• Lead, guide and mentor junior colleagues and evolve their AI engineering skillset

What you bring

• Bachelor's or master's degree in machine learning, computer science, engineering, or related technical field
• Vast coding knowledge of at least one programming language such as Python or Java
• Deep knowledge of Distributed Computing Systems for Big Data Engineering such as Databricks (PySpark/Scala)
• Exceptional understanding of AI/ML concepts
• Good understanding and hands on experience in agentic AI communication technologies such as MCP and A2A
• Exceptional understanding of AIOps and LLMOps/Agent Ops concepts (e.g. MLflow 3.0)
• Deep Infrastructure knowledge around AI solution design on Hyperscalar clouds such as Azure/AWS/GCP
• Extensive coding experience in applying ML frameworks such as Tensor Flow, PyTorch, Langchain, OpenAI, Huggingface, Crew
• Very deep experience in applying Agentic
  
  AI…