Lead Research Engineer (f/m/d): Foundation and World Models on Structured Data

In this role, you contribute to advancing foundation models for structured business data, helping bridge academia and industry. You will shape data, training, and benchmarks to enable scalable AI for enterprise problems. You collaborate across international teams to publish benchmarks and open-source work, driving practical impact in business contexts. This is an opportunity to influence AI in enterprise applications at SAP’s growing AI organization and work on high-impact, real-world challenges.

• great benefits
• focus on wellbeing
• flexible working models
• learning and skill growth
• international team
• career development

• Define data, training, and experimentation environments for scalable access to data and compute
• Lead creation of new training and benchmark datasets with rich semantic context and large-scale business data
• Collaborate on evaluation frameworks and benchmark suites for novel tasks
• Make design decisions on underlying technologies and toolchains for ML solutions
• Execute scientific experiments on internal and public data
• Drive open-source model and software contributions based on research deliverables
• Define and contribute to benchmark and dataset publications for conferences and open-source communities
• Collaborate with academic partners to tackle real business problems

• PhD or Master’s degree in computer science, AI, physics, mathematics, or related fields
• 5+ years of professional experience in machine learning on structured data in a business context
• Proven ownership of scalable ML and data environments with clear success criteria
• Knowledge of latest research trends in foundation models on structured data
• Hands-on data engineering experience
• Fluency in Python and ability to translate ideas into production-ready code
• Developer experience with SAP Applications and data models is a plus
• Strong communication and collaboration skills in cross-cultural teams

• strong communication
• cross-cultural collaboration
• analytical thinking
• Machine Learning on Structured Data
• Data Engineering
• Python programming