AI Data Lead - SAP-RPT Foundation Model Family (f/m/d)

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.    What you`ll do:

As AI Data Lead for the SAP-RPT model family, you will own and grow the data assets underpinning our foundation model development. Working closely with scientists and engineers, you will translate evolving data needs and experimental insights into a clear short-term and long-term roadmap. You will shape priorities with internal data and technology providers, bring in new proprietary, open source and synthetic data sources, and enable their compliant use in collaboration with governance functions. The role combines strategic ownership, scientific partnership and cross-functional influence with occasional direct exploration and validation to stay close to the data.   The Role:

Data assets and strategy: Own pre-training, evaluation and metadata assets, shape their strategy and expand them with new data sources. Data roadmap and prioritization: Maintain the short- and long-term roadmap, manage the extraction backlog and coordinate dependencies. Scientific collaboration: Work closely with scientists to explore how additional data could improve model capabilities and translate experimental insights into concrete data needs. Partnership: Represent the team’s data needs, influence provider priorities and ensure delivery in the required scope and form. Governance: Enable compliant data use in collaboration with Legal, Data Protection and Privacy, and Licensing. Data exploration and validation: Stay close to the data through targeted hands-on exploration and validation, building a firsthand understanding of its characteristics, quality and suitability for model development.

Education & Experience: PhD or Master’s degree in Computer Science, AI, or a relevant field, followed by 5+ years of professional experience in data & AI environments. Functional leadership and collaboration: Experience leading cross-functional technical projects with data and ML deliverables, and alignment stakeholders.

Relational enterprise data: Strong understanding of relational data, schemas, business entities and data quality challenges in enterprise environments. Experience with SAP’s business data and/or SAP’s semantic models is a plus.

Technical foundation: Solid understanding of data management technologies, including databases, combined with working knowledge of SQL and Python. Experience with SAP technologies or knowledge graphs is a plus. Machine learning understanding: Solid ML understanding, experience interpreting experiments and exposure to model development. Tabular ML is a plus.

Meet your team:   SAP is uniquely positioned to lead the next wave of AI by infusing intelligence directly into the business processes that run the world. Our team’s mission is to develop Foundation Models for structured data, starting with the launch and continued evolution of SAP-RPT-1. As the first generation of our relational model portfolio, SAP-RPT-1 represents our commitment to pioneering new research in a domain where SAP’s expertise in enterprise data structures provides an unmatched competitive edge. We are looking for innovators to join us in this journey to develop next-generation models with even higher impact, bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI research and the complex, structured reality of global enterprise data.

Skills used in this role: Model training, deep learning, feature engineering, ethical AI, data engineering, agentic orchestration, semantic retrieval, AI-assisted