AI/ML Applied Data Scientist - Generative AI

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.

Pay

The targeted annual combined range for this position is 90000-198500 USD. 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.

Schedule

Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Professional | Employment Type: Regular Full Time