AI/ML Applied Data Scientist - Generative AI

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.

Summary

We're hiring an experienced AI/ML Scientist to join our newly formed Foundation Model team in Newport Beach. This team sits at the forefront of SAP's cloud transformation, building specialized foundation models and AI agents that accelerate our customers' data transformation journeys. We own the full stack: continued pretraining on SAP data, fine-tuning for domain-specific tasks, and the agentic workflows that bring these models into SAP products.

You'll partner closely with our pretraining and fine-tuning leads, teams in Europe and India, and early-adopter customers.

What you'll do

· Model Development: Oversee the development, fine-tuning, and integration of foundation models into SAP solutions to streamline cloud transformation journeys.

· Build agents and agentic workflows: Design multi-step, tool-using agents (single-agent and multi-agent) that solve real SAP business problems, planning, tool calling, memory, reflection, and human-in-the-loop patterns.

· Evaluate rigorously: Build offline and online evaluation harnesses, task success, trajectory quality, tool-call accuracy, groundedness, and regression testing. Turn production failures into eval cases that gate deployment.

· Observe and improve: Instrument agents with tracing, session and span capture, and automated scoring. Close the loop between production signals and development (trace → eval → fix).

· Collaboration: Engage with stakeholders in different teams at SAP as well as early adopter customers and research collaborations.

What you bring

Education: BS, MS, in Computer Science, ML, Data Science, or a related field.

Experience: 3+ years of experience in data science, with at least 1 year hands-on with LLMs and agents in production or near-production settings.

Core technical skills

· Strong Python; solid software engineering fundamentals: testing, version control, modularity, async.

· Deep learning frameworks: PyTorch (primary) and familiarity with fine-tuning and PEFT methods (LoRA, QLoRA).

· LLM application development: prompting, structured outputs, function and tool calling, context management.

· Experience with LangGraph, Langfuse, MLFlow/W&B etc.

Nice to have

· Familiarity with continued pretraining, fine-tuning pipelines (SFT, DPO, RLHF), or inference optimization (vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, quantization).

· Experience running human-in-the-loop annotation workflows

Meet your team

The Foundation Model team is pioneering AI innovations within SAP, as part of the Generative AI foundation within Business AI at SAP. We build and refine our own domain-specialized foundation models on SAP business data through continued pretraining and fine-tuning, and we build the agentic layer that brings these models into SAP products. By joining our team, you'll help shape the future of AI at SAP and drive meaningful advances in how enterprise software gets transformed.

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.

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 believes the value of pay transparency contributes towards an honest and supportive culture and is a significant step toward demonstrating SAP’s commitment to pay equity. 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 90000-198500USD. 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: 451907 | Work Area: Software-Design and Development | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Professional | Employment Type: Regular Full Time | Additional Locations: #LI-Hybrid