(Senior) AI Research Engineer (f/m/d) for the Research & Innovation Team

The Role

• Closely follow the latest AI research and technology developments, identify relevant advances, and assess their practical potential for enterprise use cases
• Rapidly prototype and test new methods, architectures, and system patterns against realistic business problems, workflows, and data
• Design and build agentic systems that combine models, tools, memory, orchestration, and evaluation mechanisms into robust end-to-end solutions
• Translate promising concepts into high-quality prototypes and mature them toward product readiness with scalability, reliability, observability, and maintainability in mind
• Define and implement rigorous evaluation and benchmarking approaches to measure quality, reliability, and business usefulness
• Work closely with researchers, engineers, product teams, designers, and customers to refine ideas, validate value, and prepare successful handover into product organizations
• Help shape technical direction in ambiguous, fast-moving problem spaces with evolving goals and constraints

What you bring

• Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field
• Several years of hands-on engineering experience building advanced AI systems or products
• Strong experience staying current with the latest AI research and translating relevant advances into working prototypes and systems
• Solid experience building or designing agentic systems involving tool use, orchestration, memory, or multi-step execution
• Strong experience defining and implementing evaluation, benchmarking, and testing approaches for AI systems
• Proficiency in modern AI engineering workflows, including experimentation, model integration, system design, and iterative prototyping
• Ability to operate across research and engineering, with strong technical judgment and a clear bias toward execution
• Strong product-oriented mindset and customer focus
• Experience with model training, fine-tuning, or applied data science is a plus
• Proven technology leadership skills
• Excellent team player with strong collaboration and communication skills

Meet the Team

Research and Innovation is an interdisciplinary team in the Office of the CTO focused on bringing emerging technologies into SAP’s product portfolio. We work across the full innovation lifecycle, from research and applied exploration through prototyping, validation, and handover to product teams.

Our team brings together researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, project managers, and customer engagement managers. We work closely with customers, partners, and product teams to test new ideas against real business problems, realistic data, and enterprise-grade expectations.

Our current focus is on how recent advances in AI, especially agentic AI, can be applied in business environments in ways that are useful, trustworthy, and operationally viable.