Lead Consultant - SAP Basis

Job Title: Lead Consultant – SAP BASIS

Career Level: E

Introduction to role:

This is an opportunity to lead innovative SAP operations that power the development of life-changing medicines. Join us at the center of our SAP landscape transformation! We are modernizing our SAP platforms, scaling S/4HANA, and applying agentic AI and AIOps to deliver zero-touch, resilient operations.

You will partner with architects, BASIS engineers, application teams, and cloud specialists as we streamline end-to-end SAP operations across ABAP and HANA. How would you design automation agents and self-healing pipelines that cut toil and accelerate recovery, while improving reliability where it matters most—supporting the science, manufacturing, and supply chains that reach patients?

Accountabilities:

• Platform Architecture and Sizing: Guide high-level architecture decisions, system sizing, and infrastructure requirements for large-scale SAP systems, ensuring designs meet performance, security, and cost objectives.

• End-to-End Technical Leadership: Provide technical leadership and continuous improvement ideas to define objectives and deliver outcomes that elevate the SAP estate.

• Integration Strategy: Advise on technical approaches for systems integrating with SAP, aligning interfaces, identities, and data flows for robust, scalable operations.

• Roadmap and Transformation: Define the SAP platform roadmap and recommend best practices for digital enablement, migrations, and modernization across the enterprise.

• Product Ownership for Technology-Enhanced Operations: Lead the SAP operations product with advanced capabilities as a senior individual contributor—design to production—setting vision, guardrails, and measurable impact.

• Agentic AI within Operations: Define and lead all aspects of agentic AI that automates detection and remediation, creates self-healing pipelines, and orchestrates event-driven workflows aligned to run/operate SLOs.

• AIOps and Observability: Lead implementation of observability, predictive analytics, and AIOps to reduce toil, improve MTTR, and enhance resilience spanning the ABAP and HANA systems.

• Autonomous Remediation: Design AI agents to auto-detect and remediate BASIS issues, from enqueue server failures and dialog queue build-ups to long-running jobs, start/stop anomalies, and HANA memory pressure.

• Zero-Touch Automation: Integrate AI-powered runbooks with Ansible and hyperscaler automation (AWS Systems Manager, Azure Automation, GCP Cloud Ops) to enable closed-loop actions and zero-touch recovery.

• Cloud Reference Architectures: Define reference architectures for SAP on cloud—networking, HA/DR, security, backup/recovery, scaling—with infrastructure as code and immutable/desired-state configurations.

• Influence and Partnership: Drive technical outcomes without formal line management authority, crafting architecture and partnering across BASIS, application, data, security, and cloud teams to deliver business value.

Essential Skills/Experience:

• Deep understanding of SAP Basis workstream and hands-on leadership across SAP components such as SAP ECC, SAP APO, SAP BW, SAP Solution Manager, SAP Fiori, SAP BO, SAP GRC, and SAP SLD.

• At least one full lifecycle SAP S/4HANA implementation and support experience.

• Cloud implementation and migration experience on AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure hyperscalers.

• Knowledge of hardware infrastructure (IBM/HP/Dell) running SAP systems.

• In-depth skills and expertise in Service Management, Release Management, and Technical Deployment.

• Good communication skills, leadership abilities, and customer management.

• Working knowledge of latest SAP offerings such as SAP BTP, Cloud ALM, SAP Build, SAP Data Sphere, SAP Integration Suite, and migration/greenfield S/4HANA patterns.

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform), configuration management (Ansible), CI/CD (GitHub Actions/Azure DevOps/GitLab), and OS-level automation for Linux distributions commonly used by HANA.

• Practical use of AI agents or machine learning for anomaly detection, runbook automation, and remediation; ability to engineer event models and guardrails for safe operations.

Desirable Skills/Experience:

• SAP certifications (e.g., Basis/HANA, S/4HANA) and hyperscaler certifications (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Hands-on experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Splunk, OpenTelemetry) and SRE practices.

• Advanced HANA performance tuning, capacity planning, and memory management expertise.

• Experience with S/4HANA brownfield/greenfield migration patterns and near-zero-downtime upgrade methods.

• Automation at scale using Ansible, Terraform modules, and GitOps or equivalent experience practices; immutable infrastructure and desired-state configurations.

• Integration with enterprise platforms such as ServiceNow for incident, change, and automated remediation workflows.

• HA/DR design across multiple regions/zones, backup/recovery strategies, and resilience engineering.

• Security-first architecture for SAP on cloud, including identity, zero-trust networking, audit, and compliance.

• Experience in regulated environments (e.g., GxP) and familiarity with validation approaches.

• Cost optimization and FinOps practices for SAP workloads on cloud.

Why AstraZeneca:

Join a technology organization that pairs scientific ambition with leading digital platforms to unlock the full potential of data, AI, and automation. We bring unexpected teams in the same room unleashing bold thinking—from hackathons to production-grade solutions—backed by investment and a clear mandate to scale. Your SAP and AI expertise will directly accelerate the delivery of breakthrough medicines, while you develop modern ways of working with colleagues who value kindness alongside ambition.

Call to Action:

Step into a role where your architecture, AI innovation, and leadership will build zero-touch SAP operations that matter—submit your details today and join us as we build the next chapter of digital transformation!

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity.  We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills.  We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.  We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics.  We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.