Principal AI Application Engineer - FDE Intelligent Operations

SAP; New York (NY); On-site; USD 176,000 - 374,000; Full time

Job summary

SAP SE in New York seeks an experienced leader for the Intelligent Operations team. You will help build and scale production-grade AI governance, monitoring, and guardrails for enterprise deployments.

You will mentor engineers, own the handover framework from delivery to operations, and ensure SLA commitments are met across customer engagements worldwide. This role emphasizes reliability, security, and scalable operations.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Deep experience in observability, incident management, and production reliability across cloud environments.
• Experience in regulated or enterprise-grade settings where compliance, security posture, and operational governance aren’t optional.
• Translate experience into standards, playbooks, and repeatable processes for a growing team.

Responsibilities

• Define how Intelligent Operations works and scale it across engagements.
• Build monitoring, alerting, and incident response for AI deployments; meet SLAs by design.
• Establish operational governance for security, data boundaries, and compliance across customer engagements.
• Collaborate with other engineers and external partners; drive scalable, repeatable processes.
• Mentor engineers and set operational standards across a globally distributed team.

Skills

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

CI/CD

Job description

• Full-time
• Compensation: USD 176,300 - USD 374,300 - yearly

Company Description

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.

Job Description

About the Role

This role is part of Intelligent Operations team: \"Wesupport 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.

Qualifications

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

Additional Information

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