Senior Application Engineer — Buying Agents

Company Description

Work within a global development network where sharing expertise and learning from diverse perspectives is the norm. You will contribute to standards and grow your impact across teams and regions.

Job Description

About the team

In SAP Finance & Spend we build the cloud-native software that transforms how the world's companies buy and, collaboratively with the world's largest business network, we deliver one procurement experience across every spend category.

Buying is at its most exciting inflection point in a decade. The shift from screens-and-forms to intelligent agents that understand a buyer's intent, act on it, and get the job done is happening here, in our products and we are building a new engineering squad in Brazil to help lead it.

This team builds buying agents. These are software programs that create requisitions, search catalogs, and combine demand. They also help buyers through the procurement process. They do this in a natural way, like a great colleague. The software is based on policy and is reliable enough for the largest enterprises in the world.

But the agents are only as good as the Buying capabilities underneath them. We own the core of modern buying and the enabling foundation that lets agents act on it: shared services for policy, request routing, orchestration across procurement flows, and governed human handoff. Great agents and a robust buying platform are built as one system here, not two that is what turns a clever demo into procurement that works at enterprise scale.

What makes this team unique: we are a proving ground for SAP's agent architecture. The patterns we establish how an agent plans, calls tools, recovers from failure, and hands back to a human become the standard the broader Buying organization builds on. You won't be consuming a platform someone else designed; you'll be defining it, from real customer problems upward.

You'll work in a modern, AI-first engineering culture where agentic and AI-assisted development is how we work every day, not a side experiment. Expect an international environment, a collaborative and dynamic mix of technology and business talent across Brazil, Germany, and India, leading cloud and AI technologies, and solutions used by companies all around the globe.

What you will do

You will define and refine the architecture and technical direction for intelligent, agent-driven procurement setting the patterns that the broader Buying organization builds on. As a Senior Application Engineer on our Brazil buying squad, you own technical direction across a domain of agents and services on the SAP Business Technology Platform, and you prove that direction by building the hardest parts yourself.

In this role you will:

• Define the buying agent architecture: how agents plan, call tools, recover from failure, and hand off to humans; select the frameworks and establish the agent patterns that other engineers and teams build on.

• Define and manage the foundation for shared services: this includes policy grounding, routing, orchestration, memory, and governed handoff. Identify when a capability should be a shared component. This decision helps avoid recreating it for each agent.

• Set the AI engineering strategy. define the guardrails, safety measures, and evaluation methods. This includes golden-set evaluations and using LLM as a judge. It also involves regression harnesses for monitoring prompt and model drift. Focus on reliability and token economics as key design concerns.

• Own the integration architecture and contracts: across procurement boundaries define the APIs and event contracts that agents and services depend on, and keep them coherent as the domain grows.

• Drive alignment in architecture across teams: iknfluence engineering standards within the global Buying group. Challenge designs and spot systemic risks early. This helps ensure that the architecture is credible beyond your team.

• Define the problem space: take ambiguous, forward-looking problems, frame them clearly, challenge requirements where needed, and drive decisions to closure without escalation.

• Grow the engineering bench: mentor senior developers, design the technical onboarding and capability curricula for agentic and AI-assisted development, and raise the bar for how the whole team works.

• Stay hands-on where it counts: remain a builder - prove the architecture under real conditions by implementing the parts that are hardest to get right.

You'll do this as part of a highly motivated, agile team, with the authority to shape technical direction end-to-end and the reach of a global network of engineers and architects building the same future.

Qualifications

What you bring

You bring everything expected of a proficient Application Engineer, plus the depth to set direction and the track record to prove it. Meaningful hands-on AI engineering is non-negotiable at this level.

• Deep AI and agentic engineering: focus on creating and managing production agents. These agents are capable of planning, using tools, and recovering from failures. The role also involves designing RAG pipelines. This includes embeddings, hybrid search, and re-ranking. Additionally, it entails integrating vector stores and setting up protocols for how agents interact with each other and with tools, like MCP or similar. You select the frameworks and set the patterns.

• Agent reliability & safety at enterprise grade guardrails, prompt-injection defence, PII handling, audit trails, human-in-the-loop, and an evaluation discipline (golden-set evals, LLM-as-judge, regression harnesses for prompt/model drift); token economics (model routing, caching, cost-per-task budgeting).

• Architectural depth: Java 1721 and Spring Boot 3.x including reactive programming (WebFlux, Project Reactor) for streaming; Domain-Driven Design; the judgment to make cross-cutting decisions and identify systemic risk early.

• Platform & integration ownership: Infrastructure as Code (Terraform); observability (OpenTelemetry); message brokers (Kafka, RabbitMQ); the ability to define integration architecture and contracts rather than consume them.

• Technical leadership: decompose ambiguous problems, challenge requirements, and drive decisions to closure without escalation; grow senior engineers; set standards others adopt through ADRs, OpenAPI specs, and clean craft.

• A strong plus:SAP BTP, CAP, AI Core, HANA Cloud (Vector Engine), Integration Suite, S/4HANA Clean Core; depth in procurement, ERP, or another enterprise domain.

Additional Information

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.

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 business-critical operations spanning finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, and customer experience.

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.

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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.