SAP Principal Architect

Hybrid — Herndon, VA (onsite 2-3 days/week, Tuesday-Thursday); periodic customer travel. Contract-to-hire (6-12 month W2 contract, with conversion targeted at the 6-month mark). Start date ASAP.

About the role

Serve as the overarching technical architect for a leading enterprise software provider's largest and most strategic federal, defense, and national security customers, guiding them through SAP cloud and AI modernization.

• Lead discovery and business transformation workshops to assess customers' current ("as-is") SAP environments, uncover business and technical challenges, and define future-state goals.
• Translate discovery findings into heatmaps, transition plans, target-state architecture diagrams, and modernization roadmaps aligned to the customer's mission and business strategy.
• Operate at two levels: connect architecture decisions to mission, business objectives, risk, cost, and long-term roadmap at the executive level — and go deep on S/4HANA deployment models, RISE, BTP, Integration Suite, APIs, PI/PO modernization, Datasphere, HANA, BW, and cloud architecture when the conversation calls for it.
• Advise rather than sell: help customers understand why a particular SAP capability fits their business problem, including capabilities they hadn't initially considered, and articulate the business value and long-term architectural impact.
• Collaborate with functional architects, enterprise architects, engagement leads, implementation teams, and SAP subject-matter experts, and stay engaged through delivery to ensure the architecture is executed as designed.
• Expect roughly 25% hands-on work — you'll be diagramming architecture for customers far more often than personally building components, with delivery teams supporting implementation.

Requirements

• 10+ years of hands-on SAP configuration and implementation experience, plus 5+ years in architecture, strategy, and solution conceptualization.
• A career built through the SAP technical stack — ideally starting in SAP Basis, progressing through BTP, and into architecture.
• Hands-on technical work within the last 5 years; this is not a role for architects who have moved entirely away from the technical details.
• Deep experience with SAP ECC, S/4HANA (private and public cloud), SAP BTP, and RISE with SAP.
• Strong knowledge across integration architecture (PI/PO to Integration Suite, APIs), data architecture (Datasphere, HANA, BW/4HANA, BDC, MDG), security and compliance (GRC, IdM), ALM (Solution Manager, Cloud ALM), and cloud infrastructure (BTP, AWS, Azure).
• Proven experience leading customer-facing discovery/BTS workshops, building executive relationships, and translating business needs into technical roadmaps.
• Comfortable discussing SAP AI capabilities (Joule, SAP Business AI) and customer use cases; you don't need to be an AI specialist.
• Excellent executive-level facilitation, presentation, and communication skills, with the ability to estimate the financial impact of architectural alternatives.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field, or equivalent experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• SAP LeanIX
• SAP Signavio
• Cloud ALM or TOGAF certification
• Aerospace & Defense or Public Sector implementation experience

Pay

$90-100/hr W2

Benefits

Eligible for Health, Dental, Vision, 401K