Senior Researcher in Embedded Research for SAP Autonomous Suite / CX (f/m/d)

Working together with the SAP Autonomous Suite CX team, focusing on customer satisfaction by increasing the predictability of the semester plans, you will bring perspectives and insights from large-scale agile and software development research to our product delivery planning, enhancing SAP’s strategic position in the Autonomous Suite and the innovation speed, and bridging the gap between industry and academia.

The Role:

In your daily work you will be bridging data science and engineering to turn development data into actionable insights — accelerating team flow, predictability, and customer satisfaction across SAP Commerce release cycles, collaborating with industry experts, researchers, and business stakeholders. The position involves working within a highly motivated team of experts, driving innovation in a collaborative research environment, with close collaboration across lines of business and strong potential to influence future product directions and innovation at scale.

• Design and maintain a Commerce-wide engineering metrics framework to track delivery health and team performance
• Review metrics health at team, product, and portfolio level to surface bottlenecks and delivery risks early
• Embed retrospective learnings into process standards, creating a continuous improvement loop across Commerce teams
• Pilot AI-assisted tooling to improve planning accuracy, effort estimation, and workflow automation
• Share engineering excellence practices across squads and teams to accelerate adoption of predictable delivery patterns
• Bridge the gap between academic findings and industry
• Participate in interdisciplinary research activities with the PhD graduate team, supporting SAP’s research strategy
• Be an active part of research mentoring programs and the research community at SAP
• Collaborate with various internal and external stakeholders

• Advanced degree (PhD preferred) in Computer Science or Information Systems, with a research focus on large-scale agile development, engineering metrics, or communities of practice in software organizations
• Research background (publications preferred) in the field of innovation (incl. AI adoption) in software development models, scrum, agile, adoption or other development models
• Proven track record of applied industry-academic research related to agile contexts (conferences like IEEE CBI, publications preferred)
• Experience leading research projects and delivering data-driven recommendations in collaboration with industry partners
• Hands-on technical skills including data analysis, LLM and AI-assisted prototyping, and working with engineering telemetry data (e.g. Jira) to generate delivery insights, programming skills preferred (python, Java, JavaScript)
• Demonstrated ability to manage industry-academic partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives, and co-organizing large-scale events
• Ability to work on challenging research topics with a structured, scientific approach
• Sound understanding of SAP’s product strategy and the Autonomous Enterprise
• Experience integrating AI assistants in workflows, incl. quality assurance.
• Strong hands-on mindset and willingness to translate promising research direction into product functionality
• Strong collaboration skills and a team-oriented mindset
• Good written and verbal communication skills in English, German is a plus

We offer

What's in it for you? Constant learning, skill growth, great benefits, and a team that wants you to grow and succeed. #LI-JK4

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. Requisition ID: 456601 | Work Area: Software-Research | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Berufserfahren | Employment Type: Vollzeit, unbefristet | Additional Locations: #LI