Foundation Model Team • Newport Beach, CA Summary We're building specialized foundation models and AI agents that accelerate SAP customers' data transformation journeys.
The agents you build will directly power SAP's Autonomous Enterprise, where AI runs core business processes end-to-end across finance, supply chain, HR, and procurement at global scale.
You'll set technical direction, define how we architect and scale multi-agent systems, and raise the engineering bar across a global team. You'll work directly with pretraining and fine-tuning team leads in Europe, India, and early-adopter customers.
We want someone who has shipped agentic systems in production and knows where they break.
What you'll do - Architect and lead multi-agent systems: design, orchestration patterns, failure modes, memory, planning, and human-in-the-loop
- Own the path from prototype to production: containerization, guardrails, cost and latency optimization, scalable serving
- Define the team's evaluation strategy: offline/online harnesses, trajectory quality, tool-call accuracy, regression testing, CI/CD eval gates
- Lead instrumentation and observability: tracing, span capture, automated scoring, closing the trace → eval → fix loop
- Drive tool integration architecture via MCP across multiple product teams
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code and architecture reviews; set engineering standards
What you bring Education: BS, MS, or PhD in Computer Science, ML, or a related field.
Experience: 6+ years building and shipping ML systems, with 3+ years hands-on with LLMs and agents in production.
Core technical skills
- Expert Python; strong fundamentals: system design, testing, modularity, async, API design
- PyTorch; working knowledge of fine-tuning and PEFT methods (LoRA, QLoRA)
- LLM application development: prompting, structured outputs, tool calling, context management
- Inference optimization: vLLM, TensorRT-LLM, quantization (int8, int4, GPTQ, AWQ)
- Human-in-the-loop annotation workflows at scale
Agent frameworks and orchestration (production experience with at least three)
- CrewAI, AutoGen/AG2, or equivalent
- MCP (Model Context Protocol)
- Coding agents: Claude Code, OpenCode, or similar
Evaluation and observability (production experience with at least two)
- Langfuse, LangSmith, Arize, or equivalent
- LLM-as-judge evaluators, CI/CD eval gates
Leadership
- Demonstrated track record mentoring engineers and raising team technical quality
- Drives decisions in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
- Writes design docs that earn buy-in across teams
Nice to have
- Continued pretraining or fine-tuning pipelines (SFT, DPO, RLHF)
Meet your team The Foundation Model team is part of the Generative AI foundation within Business AI at SAP. We build domain-specialized foundation models on SAP business data through continued pretraining and fine-tuning, and we build the agentic layer that brings them into SAP products.
Requisition ID: 457862 | Work Area: Software-Design and Development | Expected Travel: 0 - 10% | Career Status: Professional | Employment Type: Regular Full Time | Additional Locations: #LI-Hybrid
Requisition ID: 457862
Posted Date: Jul 29, 2026
Work Area: Software-Design and Development
Career Status: Professional
Employment Type: Regular Full Time
Expected Travel: 0 - 10%
Location:
