Expert AI & Cloud Development Architect - Office of the CTO

About the Position

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.

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 (FinOps).
• Security-by-design: threat modeling, zero trust, mTLS, secure SDLC
• Evaluate run proofs-of-concept, 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

Requirements

• 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.

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; NoSQL (DynamoDB/CosmosDB/Cassandra/MongoDB); caching (Redis); search (Elasticsearch/OpenSearch); object storage (S3/GCS/Azure Blob)
• Streaming & messaging: Kafka/Pulsar/Kinesis/Pub/Sub; queues (SQS/RabbitMQ)
• Observability stack: OpenTelemetry; Prometheus/Grafana; Jaeger/Zipkin/Tempo; centralized logging (ELK/OpenSearch)
• CI/CD & IaC: GitHub Actions/GitLab CI/Jenkins; GitOps (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.

We Offer

• Competitive salary range: $198,000 - $420,000 (USD) annually
• Regular Full Time employment
• Hybrid work location
• Opportunity to work with a global, cross-functional team
• Constant learning and skill growth
• Great benefits and professional development budget

About the Company

SAP innovations help more than four hundred thousand customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. Originally known for leadership in enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP has evolved to become a market leader in end-to-end business application software and related services for database, analytics, intelligent technologies, and experience management. As a cloud company with two hundred million users and more than one hundred thousand employees worldwide, we are purpose-driven and future-focused, with a highly collaborative team ethic and commitment to personal development. Whether connecting global industries, people, or platforms, we help ensure every challenge gets the solution it deserves. At SAP, you can bring out your best.

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 provides the annualized compensation range inclusive of base salary and variable incentive target for the career level applicable to the posted role. The targeted annual combined range for this position is $198,000 - $420,000 (USD). The actual amount to be offered to the successful candidate will be within that range, dependent upon the key aspects of each case which may include education, skills, experience, scope of the role, location, etc. as determined through the selection process. Any SAP variable incentive includes a targeted dollar amount and any actual payout amount is dependent on company and personal 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.

Requisition ID: 447785

Work Area: Software-Design and Development

Expected Travel: 0 - 10%

Career Status: Professional

Employment Type: Regular Full Time

Location: Palo Alto, CA, US, 94304

Nearest Major Market: San Jose

Nearest Secondary Market: Palo Alto

Job Segment: Developer, ERP, Testing, Architecture, Cloud, Technology, Engineering

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