Principal AI Application Engineer - FDE Intelligent Operations

Work in SAP's global development ecosystem where expertise is valued. You will collaborate across regions, share insights, and contribute to shaping industry-leading practices.

About the Role 

This role is part of Intelligent Operations team: "We support and guardrail AI forward deployed engineering engagements across SAP industries, ensuring quality, security and lasting impact."

What you’ll build

You’re building Intelligent Operations from the ground up. This capability doesn’t exist at scale yet — you’ll define how it works.

Handover model: Take care of what “production-ready” looks like when an FDE engagement transitions from Value Delivery to Value Operation. You own the handover framework — what needs to be in place before your team takes over.

Run-team operations: Build the monitoring, alerting, and incident response capability for deployed AI solutions. Ensure contractual SLA commitments are met — not by heroics, but by design.

AI quality in production: Drift detection, performance benchmarking, guardrails validation, retraining triggers. The solutions we deploy use LLMs and agents — production quality assurance looks fundamentally different here than in classical software.

Operational governance: Establish best practices for production security, data boundaries, and compliance across customer engagements. Work with other engineers to ensure the enterprise bar holds post-deployment and establish self-healing capabilities.

Scalable operations: What works for one customer engagement needs to work for fifty. You’ll design the operational model to scale — tooling, automation, partner integration — so that every new go-live doesn’t require reinventing the wheel.

You’ll work closely with the Knowledge & IP team to capture operational learnings and feed them back into the delivery lifecycle, so the next collaboration starts stronger.

Where you belong

T&O is the engineering backbone of CIS Forward Deployed Engineering. Our mission: ensure quality, security, and lasting impact across AI engagements for SAP’s industry customers.

You’ll sit in the Intelligent Operations pillar — the part of T&O that owns what happens after go-live. Deployed solutions stay healthy and improve. That’s the mandate.

This is a leadership role without a management title. You’ll mentor engineers, set operational standards, and build the technical capabilities of a team that’s being assembled now. You’ll work globally, across FDE squads and hubs, with external delivery partners, and directly with customers when production demands it.

If you’ve spent your career at the intersection of SRE, AI systems, and enterprise operations — and you want to build something new rather than maintain something existing — this is the role.

Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) Statement

Our company does not discriminate in employment on the basis of race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy and gender identity), national origin, political affiliation, sexual orientation, marital status, disability, genetic information, age, membership in an employee organization, retaliation, parental status, military service, or other non-merit factor.

What you’ll bring

You know what it takes to keep AI-native solutions running in production — not in a lab, but in customer environments where uptime, data boundaries, and contractual SLAs are non-negotiable. You’ve worked hands-on with LLM-based systems, agentic workflows, and distributed architectures, and you understand that building something is only half the job — the other half is making sure it stays healthy after go-live.

You bring deep experience in observability, incident management, and production reliability across cloud environments. You can spot drift in agentic application behavior before it becomes a customer escalation. You’ve operated in regulated or enterprise-grade settings where compliance, security posture, and operational governance aren’t optional. And you can translate that experience into standards, playbooks, and repeatable processes that a growing team can follow.

You’re comfortable working across organizational boundaries — with delivery squads, engineering/ platform teams, and customers/ external partners — and you can hold your ground in a room full of architects who built the thing you now need to run.

Skills used in this role

AI adoption mindset, AI output quality assurance, AI-assisted development, Context engineering, Agentic orchestration, Agentic engineering, Application security, Cloud architecture, Observability, High availability engineering, Troubleshooting, Evaluations and benchmarking engineering, CI/CD.

This role will require up to 20% travel

#LI-RS11

All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

About SAP
With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improves people’s lives.
As a leader in enterprise applications and business AI, SAP stands at the nexus of business and technology. For over 50 years, organizations have trusted SAP to bring out their best by uniting business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience.

We win with inclusion
SAP’s culture of inclusion, focus on health and well-being, and flexible working models help ensure that everyone – regardless of background – feels included and can run at their best. At SAP, we believe we are made stronger by the unique capabilities and qualities that each person brings to our company, and we invest in our employees to inspire confidence and help everyone realize their full potential. We ultimately believe in unleashing all talent and creating a better world.
SAP is committed to the values of Equal Employment Opportunity and provides accessibility accommodations to applicants with physical and/or mental disabilities. If you are interested in applying for employment with SAP and are in need of accommodation or special assistance to navigate our website or to complete your application, please send an e-mail with your request to Recruiting Operations Team: [email protected].
For SAP employees: Only permanent roles are eligible for the SAP Employee Referral Program, according to the eligibility rules set in the SAP Referral Policy. Specific conditions may apply for roles in Vocational Training.
Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to their age, race, religion, national origin, ethnicity, age, gender (including pregnancy, childbirth, et al), sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, protected veteran status, or disability.

Compensation Range Transparency
SAP believes pay transparency is essential to fostering an honest, supportive, and inclusive culture and is an important part of our commitment to pay equity. The salary range for this position is included in the job posting. The actual compensation offered to the successful candidate will fall within that range and will depend on factors such as education, skills, experience, location, and scope of the role, as determined through the selection process. Where applicable, SAP may also provide variable incentive opportunities and additional benefits, subject to the terms of the relevant plans and policies. Any variable incentive amount is target-based, with actual payouts dependent on company and individual performance. Please reference this link for a summary of SAP benefits and eligibility requirements: SAP North America Benefits.

AI Usage in the Recruitment Process
For information on the responsible use of AI in our recruitment process, please refer to our Guidelines for Ethical Usage of AI in the Recruiting Process.
Please note that any violation of these guidelines may result in disqualification from the hiring process.