SAP Technical Lead

Location: San Francisco, CA or Mountain View, CA

GAQ126R43

About Databricks

At Databricks, our mission is to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems—and that begins with empowering our own employees with exceptional internal products. The Databricks IT organization is a product-led engineering team building intelligent, AI-powered platforms that simplify how work gets done across the company. For Finance, our vision is to eliminate manual, repetitive work by automating complex business processes, surfacing actionable insights, and orchestrating end-to-end workflows. We are reimagining finance operations so teams spend less time processing transactions, chasing approvals, and resolving exceptions, and more time delivering strategic insights that accelerate the business.

We're looking for an SAP Technical Lead to own the technical architecture and delivery of our SAP platform. In this role, you'll define the technical vision for a clean-core S/4HANA landscape, lead the engineers who build on it, and architect the intelligent, agentic AI layer that sits between SAP and the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. You'll set the standards, make the hard build-versus-adopt calls, and ensure everything we ship is secure, performant, and built to scale.

The Opportunity

SAP will serve as the foundation for Databricks' core finance processes, including Record-to-Report, Source-to-Pay, and Order-to-Cash. As the SAP Technical Lead, you will own how those processes are engineered—from the clean-core S/4HANA core and its extensions, to the integration fabric that connects SAP to the rest of the enterprise, to the AI and agentic services that make the experience intelligent. Rather than accumulating custom code inside the digital core, you'll champion a modern extensibility model on SAP BTP and the Databricks Lakehouse, so Finance teams get automated, AI-driven workflows on top of a core that stays clean, upgradable, and fast. Your mission is to combine the strength of SAP with the power of Databricks AI to build a technical foundation that lets the business scale.

What You'll Do

• Own the Technical Architecture: Define and own the end-to-end technical architecture for the S/4HANA landscape (greenfield, brownfield, or selective data transition), aligned to clean-core principles, with clear guardrails that keep the digital core standard and upgrade-ready.
• Lead the Extensibility Strategy: Define and own the extensibility strategy for SAP, using Databricks-native applications to address business requirements beyond core SAP capabilities. Establish clear architecture and governance standards to ensure extensions are scalable, secure, and aligned with the broader Finance technology strategy.
• Drive Enterprise AI Integration: Drive a strong integration with ongoing Enterprise AI transformation within Databricks by bringing AI fluency and hands on AI experience.
• Design the Integration Fabric: Architect secure, resilient integration across SAP and non-SAP systems using SAP Integration Suite, event-driven patterns, APIs, OData v4, and change-data feeds into the Lakehouse, with clear contracts, error handling, and observability.
• Unify SAP Data in the Lakehouse: Partner with data engineering on the technical patterns for landing SAP data in Databricks—ingestion, CDC, semantic and master-data modeling, lineage, and governance.
• Set Engineering Standards: Establish CI/CD, automated testing, and transport/deployment pipelines for BTP artifacts; own code and design reviews; and define the technical standards, security patterns, and best practices the team builds against.
• Lead the Team: Mentor developers and architects, lead technical steering, and act as the connective tissue across the SAP ecosystem (BTP, Integration Suite) and the systems around it, partnering closely with functional, product, and partner engineering teams.
• Be Accountable for Non-Functionals: Own performance, scalability, security, resilience, and cost across the landscape; report technical status, risks, and roadmaps to stakeholders.

What You Bring

• 10+ years in SAP technical roles, with 3+ years as a technical lead or architect, and a proven track record delivering at least one full S/4HANA program (greenfield or conversion) plus BTP-based extension delivery.
• Clean-Core Architecture: Deep, hands-on command of clean-core principles—custom-code assessment and remediation, in-app vs. side-by-side extensibility, released APIs and extension points, and the governance that keeps the core clean over time.
• SAP BTP & Modern Development: Advanced experience across SAP BTP, ABAP Cloud and the ABAP RESTful Application Programming Model (RAP), CDS, and CAP, with Fiori/SAPUI5 on the front end.
• AI & Agentic Systems: Hands-on experience or strong technical command of agentic automation, LLM orchestration, retrieval-augmented generation, and evaluation—plus clear judgment about where AI belongs in a controlled, auditable ERP process and where it does not.
• Integration & APIs: Advanced experience with SAP Integration Suite, API management, event-driven architecture, and REST/OData, integrating hybrid SAP and non-SAP landscapes.
• Data Fluency: Solid understanding of modern data platforms, SAP data extraction and modeling, pipelines, and semantic layers, and the practical work of making ERP data usable for analytics and AI.
• Governance Rigor: Working knowledge of SAP authorizations, SoD, SOX and audit requirements, and the ability to architect solutions and automation that satisfy them.
• Leadership: Ability to translate business requirements into technical architecture, present tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders, mentor engineers, and make pragmatic decisions that balance speed against long-term maintainability.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience building custom applications or automation layers on modern data platforms (such as Databricks) that extend or sit alongside SAP.
• A clear point of view on build-versus-adopt tradeoffs across the SAP AI and extension stack (BTP, AI Core, Joule) versus a Databricks-native approach.
• Hands-on knowledge of SAP integration surfaces and their limitations, including OData and REST APIs, CDS views, and Datasphere.
• Experience running Agile delivery with system integrators and managed service partners, including vendor and SLA accountability.
• SAP certification in SAP BTP, S/4HANA, or a relevant technology area, and prior work in a high-growth technology company where ERP had to scale quickly.