Senior Director, SAP Technical Lead

Senior Director, SAP Technical Lead – Merck

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• Seniority level:
  Director
• Employment type:
  
  Full-time
• Job function:
  Information Technology
• Industry: Pharmaceutical Manufacturing

The SAP Technical Lead is responsible for end-to-end technical leadership across our company's Human Health SAP global landscape, including SAP application development, Basis administration, Cloud Ops and SAP security. This role ensures system stability, performance, scalability, and compliance, while driving engineering best practices, automation, AI aligned with business objectives and priorities. The ideal candidate combines deep SAP technical expertise with strong leadership, stakeholder management, and a pragmatic approach to governance.

• Own the technical roadmap for SAP, aligning with enterprise architecture, business strategy, and release plans.
• Define and enforce technical standards, development guidelines, and Dev Ops practices across our company's SAP technology stack.
• Establish governance for transport management, code review and quality, security controls, and technical change management.
• Partner with Enterprise Architecture and Security to ensure adherence to architectural principles, Cyber guidelines and regulatory requirements (GxP, SOX, etc.) and audit readiness.
• Drive innovation, new technology, and modern ways of working such as Agile.
• Define technical roadmap prioritizing AI and latest technology.
• Execute roadmap to modernize solutions and applications.

• Lead ABAP and SAP development teams (including Fiori, BTP, Mobile applications).
• Ensure best practices for technical designs, standards and performance.
• Drive code quality through standards, peer reviews, AI tools, static analysis, unit testing, and pipelines.
• Oversee custom enhancements, interfaces, conversions, reports; minimize technical debt.
• Guide modernization:
  Fiori enablement, S/4
  
  HANA simplification, clean core, extensibility via BTP.

• Ensure reliable operations: installation, configuration, upgrades, SPS/FPs, HANA upgrades, patching.
• Oversee performance, capacity, HA/DR, backup, monitoring (Cloud ALM).
• Manage landscapes on-premise, cloud, RISE, SaaS, hybrid.
• Optimize HANA performance, housekeeping, job scheduling.
• Ensure OSS notes implementation and vendor coordination.
• Lead best-in-class technical operations with SAP and RISE ops.

• Ensure SAP security architecture: role design, authorization concepts, SoD.
• Oversee GRC Access Control, emergency access, periodic reviews.
• Implement security baselines, logging, threat detection.
• Remediate audit findings, vulnerability management, regulatory compliance.

• Establish CI/CD for SAP with internal toolsets, automated testing, transport orchestration.
• Implement observability: metrics, logs, traces; define SLAs.
• Drive incident, problem, change management, root cause analysis, post-incident reviews.
• Plan releases, environment refreshes; manage downtime windows.

• Collaborate with SAP functional leads and ops to prioritize backlog.
• Provide technical estimates, risk assessments, resource planning; manage vendor partners.
• Communicate complex topics in business terms; present status, risks, mitigation to leadership.

• Build and mentor high-performing SAP technical team.
• Define roles, career paths; foster culture of innovation, AI-first, accountability.
• Standardize documentation, runbooks, knowledge sharing.
• Build internal capabilities in Tech Hubs.

• Extensive experience in SAP and S4 HANA.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Engineering, or related.
• Master’s degree preferred.
• 15+ years progressive SAP technical experience with leadership.
• Experience with core ERP, MDG, ATTP, GTS, GRC, BTP, GBT, SLT, Solution Manager, Cloud ALM, integrations and connectors with SaaS SAP applications.
• Deep hands-on expertise in ABAP, Fiori/UI5, BTP, ATC, performance tuning.
• Experience in SAP Basis administration, HANA DB, transport,…