Landscape Automation Expert

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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.

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

SAP is the global market leader for business software and related services, and SAP National Security Services Inc.® (SAP NS2®) is an independent U.S. subsidiary, offering SAP solutions with specialized levels of security and support to meet the requirements of U.S. national security and critical infrastructure customers.

Must be a US Citizen; this position requires access to customer data. All internals must have Manager’s approval to transfer.

Position Overview

We are seeking a highly hands-on Automation Architect to help define and execute our vision for end-to-end automation and increasingly autonomous operations across the SAP Basis R&R. We are looking for a technology professional with a strong software development and engineering background who naturally thinks in terms of workflows, automation, APIs, orchestration, event-driven architectures, and AI-enabled operations.

The successful candidate will identify operational processes that are manual, repetitive, or error-prone and transform them into scalable, reusable, automated, and AI-enabled solutions.

The individual will work closely with SAP operations, development, infrastructure and security to turn ideas into production-ready solutions.

The overall objective is to move SAP operations from Manual to Scripted to Automated to AI-Assisted to Autonomous.

Key Responsibilities:

Drive the SAP NS2’s Zero Ops Vision

• Help define and execute the technical roadmap for Zero Ops and autonomous operations across SAP NS2.
• Identify opportunities to eliminate, simplify, automate, or make autonomous existing operational processes.
• Develop an automation opportunity pipeline based on operational pain points, business value, complexity, risk, and feasibility.
• Challenge traditional operational approaches and identify opportunities to improve reliability, speed, and efficiency through technology.
• Establish reusable automation patterns rather than developing isolated scripts or point solutions.
• Work with SAP and enterprise operations teams to understand current processes and identify opportunities for transformation.

Identify and Design End-to-End Automation Workflows

• Analyze operational processes from trigger to completion, rather than automating individual tasks in isolation.
• Design workflows that can detect an event, collect relevant information, analyze the situation, determine an action, execute the action, and validate the outcome.
• Translate operational requirements into technical workflows, APIs, automation services, and reusable components.
• Identify opportunities to introduce event-driven automation and closed-loop remediation.
• Define appropriate human-in-the-loop, approval, exception-handling, rollback, and validation mechanisms.
• Develop prototypes and proofs of concept to rapidly demonstrate automation opportunities.

The candidate should naturally think Event,Detect, Gather Data, Diagnose, Decide, Approve, Execute, Validate, Document, Learn.

Software Development & Engineering

• Design and develop production-quality automation services and applications.
• Build APIs, microservices, workflow components, integrations, and automation frameworks.
• Use strong software engineering practices including Git, code reviews, testing, CI/CD, logging, monitoring, and documentation.
• Develop reusable and maintainable automation components rather than one-off scripts.
• Apply engineering principles such as modularity, idempotency, error handling, retries, rollback, testing, and observability.
• Work closely with development teams to integrate automation capabilities into enterprise platforms.

Strong software development experience is a core requirement for this role.

Automation Engineering

• Design and implement automation using Ansible, Python, APIs, orchestration platforms, and event-driven technologies.
• Build reusable Ansible playbooks, roles, modules, and automation frameworks.
• Integrate automation with SAP, cloud platforms, monitoring systems, ITSM platforms, and enterprise APIs.
• Automate operational workflows across SAP, operating systems, infrastructure, and supporting services.
• Establish automation standards, reusable patterns, and best practices.
• Build mechanisms for automated validation and safe remediation.

The expectation is to treat automation as software engineering, not simply scripting.

AI & Agentic Automation

• Identify practical opportunities to use AI and generative AI to improve SAP operations.
• Develop AI-assisted capabilities for incident analysis, troubleshooting, root-cause analysis, knowledge retrieval, and remediation recommendations.
• Explore and develop agentic workflows where AI can interact with enterprise tools and approved automation capabilities.
• Integrate AI agents with APIs, workflow engines, monitoring platforms, and automation frameworks.
• Establish appropriate guardrails, permissions, approval mechanisms, auditability, and human oversight.
• Evaluate AI solutions based on accuracy, reliability, security, operational value, and scalability.
• Stay current with emerging AI and agentic technologies and identify opportunities to apply them to enterprise operations.

The candidate does not need to be an AI researcher. The expectation is that they can apply AI to real operational problems.

SAP Operations

• Develop a strong understanding of RISE with SAP architecture, operating models, and operational processes.
• Work closely with SAP Basis and SAP application teams to understand operational challenges and identify automation opportunities.
• Develop automation around SAP system health, monitoring, troubleshooting, configuration, operational checks, and remediation.
• Understand SAP HANA and relevant SAP infrastructure and operating-system dependencies.
• Work with SAP APIs, interfaces, monitoring mechanisms, and integration capabilities.
• Translate SAP operational requirements into automation and software solutions.

Deep SAP Basis expertise is not mandatory if the candidate demonstrates strong engineering, automation, and problem-solving capabilities and can work effectively with SAP specialists.

Collaboration with Cloud Architecture

The organization has a dedicated Cloud Architecture team. This role will partner with and leverage that team rather than replace the enterprise Cloud Architect role.

The candidate will:

• Develop high-level solution concepts and technical requirements for automation solutions.
• Define application, integration, data, security, scalability, and operational requirements.
• Work with Cloud Architects to translate automation concepts into enterprise-approved cloud architectures.
• Collaborate on cloud service selection, deployment patterns, networking, IAM, security, observability, and scalability.
• Ensure solutions align with enterprise cloud standards and architecture principles.
• Communicate effectively with Cloud Architects and understand architectural trade-offs.
• Bring new automation and AI ideas to the Cloud Architecture team for assessment and implementation.

The candidate should have sufficient cloud knowledge to think architecturally and participate in cloud design discussions, but does not need to own enterprise cloud architecture.

• Continuously explore emerging automation, AI, and engineering technologies.
• Identify opportunities to improve existing operational workflows.
• Build prototypes and demonstrate new ideas quickly.
• Establish a culture of experimentation followed by disciplined productionization.
• Measure the impact of automation and continuously optimize solutions.
• Share reusable patterns, lessons learned, and technical innovations across engineering and operations teams.

Required Qualifications

Software Development

• Strong professional experience in software development or software engineering.
• Strong proficiency in Python or a comparable modern programming language.
• Strong understanding of software engineering principles and