Job Description

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 build:

The Academic Partnerships organization at SAP partners with other SAP teams to provide the best services to foster strategic research collaborations between SAP and academia. The PhD Graduate Team is responsible for building the bridge between cutting-edge research and SAP functional teams. Our mission is to facilitate the application of research across SAP and contribute to SAP research strategy with interdisciplinary research activities.

Working together with the SAP Autonomous Suite CX team, focusing on customer satisfaction by increasing the predictability of the semester plans, you will bring perspectives and insights from large-scale agile and software development research to our product delivery planning, enhancing SAP’s strategic position in the Autonomous Suite and the innovation speed, and bridging the gap between industry and academia.

The Role

In your daily work you will be bridging data science and engineering to turn development data into actionable insights — accelerating team flow, predictability, and customer satisfaction across SAP Commerce release cycles, collaborating with industry experts, researchers, and business stakeholders.

The position involves working within a highly motivated team of experts, driving innovation in a collaborative research environment, with close collaboration across lines of business and strong potential to influence future product directions and innovation at scale.

• Design and maintain a Commerce-wide engineering metrics framework to track delivery health and team performance
• Review metrics health at team, product, and portfolio level to surface bottlenecks and delivery risks early
• Embed retrospective learnings into process standards, creating a continuous improvement loop across Commerce teams
• Pilot AI-assisted tooling to improve planning accuracy, effort estimation, and workflow automation
• Share engineering excellence practices across squads and teams to accelerate adoption of predictable delivery patterns
• Bridge the gap between academic findings and industry
• Participate in interdisciplinary research activities with the PhD graduate team, supporting SAP’s research strategy
• Be an active part of research mentoring programs and the research community at SAP
• Collaborate with various internal and external stakeholders

What you bring:

• Advanced degree (PhD preferred) in Computer Science or Information Systems, with a research focus on large-scale agile development, engineering metrics, or communities of practice in software organizations
• Research background (publications preferred) in the field of innovation (incl. AI adoption) in software development models, scrum, agile, adoption or other development models
• Proven track record of applied industry-academic research related to agile contexts (conferences like IEEE CBI, publications preferred)
• Experience leading research projects and delivering data-driven recommendations in collaboration with industry partners
• Hands-on technical skills including data analysis, LLM and AI-assisted prototyping, and working with engineering telemetry data (e.g. Jira) to generate delivery insights, programming skills preferred (python, Java, JavaScript)
• Demonstrated ability to manage industry-academic partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives, and co-organizing large-scale events
• Ability to work on challenging research topics with a structured, scientific approach
• Sound understanding of SAP’s product strategy and the Autonomous Enterprise
• Experience integrating AI assistants in workflows, incl. quality assurance.
• Strong hands-on mindset and willingness to translate promising research direction into product functionality
• Strong collaboration skills and a team-oriented mindset
• Good written and verbal communication skills in English, German is a plus

Where you belong:

The Academic Partnership organization at SAP is the bridge connecting SAP and academia. We build collaborative, structured partnerships with academic institutions and encompass a wide range of activities and programs in regards of academic teaching, academic community management, and PhD talent management.

The PhD Graduate Team stands for embedding cutting-edge research into functional teams across SAP, bringing together interdisciplinary PhD talent in a research-like environment.

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Bring out your best

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.

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: Careers@sap.com.

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.

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: 456601 | Work Area: Software-Research | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Berufserfahren | Employment Type: Vollzeit, unbefristet | Additional Locations: #LI-Hybrid

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