Engineering Manager – SAP Technology & Cloud Platforms

Imagine what you could do here. At Apple, great ideas have a way of becoming great products, services, and customer experiences very quickly. By bringing passion, dedication, and technical excellence to your role, there is no telling what you could accomplish.
We are seeking an experienced and visionary Engineering Manager (MGR2) to lead our SAP Technology and Cloud Engineering organization in Shanghai. In this critical technical leadership capacity, you will lead a high-performing, multidisciplinary team of Apple engineers and managed service partners across SAP BTP, Basis & HANA Database Administration, Cloud/DevOps (Alibaba Cloud & AWS), Security & Governance, and End-to-End Performance Engineering.
Beyond organizational leadership, you will serve as the principal technical partner to regional and global SAP Track Managers.

As the SAP Technical Manager, you will be directly accountable for the foundational platform and infrastructure powering Apple's mission-critical enterprise workloads in China. This role uniquely blends hands-on engineering stewardship, 24x7 production resilience, cloud platform evolution, and external vendor governance.
You will lead from the front—setting architectural benchmarks, instilling operational rigor, and bridging technical capability with business enablement. You will establish trusted partnerships with functional process owners and global IS&T counterparts to ensure China’s SAP systems deliver unmatched reliability, performance, and compliance with enterprise security and regulatory standards.

1. People & Organizational Leadership
• Lead & Mentor Engineering Talent: Direct, coach, and grow an elite team of engineers covering SAP Basis, SAP BTP Platform & Security, Cloud Infrastructure / DevOps, and HANA DB & Application Performance Engineering.
• Hybrid Workforce & Vendor Governance: Oversee managed service providers, system integrators, and contractor staff. Define engineering standards, enforce Statements of Work (SOW), set KPIs/SLAs, and drive delivery excellence across outsourced engagements.
• Engineering Culture: Champion technical curiosity, evidence-based problem solving, operational discipline, and a culture of continuous learning and innovation.
2. Functional Alignment & Stakeholder Management
• Business & Functional Synchronization: Serve as the primary technical liaison and trusted advisor to functional track managers across business domains (e.g., Supply Chain, Operations, Retail, Finance).
• Release & Cutover Planning: Partner with functional leads on project roadmaps, enhancement cutovers, downtime scheduling, and integration timelines to achieve zero disruption to live operations.
• Global & Regional Alignment: Partner with worldwide architecture, global Basis/BTP teams, and InfoSec to harmonize local architecture with corporate standards while addressing regional business requirements.
3. Platform Modernization & 24x7 Production Operations
• High Availability & SLA Governance: Own the availability, disaster recovery (DR), and performance SLOs of China’s SAP production environments (S/4HANA, ECC, BTP, and associated microservices).
• Hybrid Cloud & BTP Modernization: Drive the evolutionary roadmap from traditional infrastructure to modern hybrid architectures leveraging SAP BTP (Integration Suite, Kyma/Cloud Foundry, Advanced Event Mesh) and hyperscalers (primarily Alibaba Cloud).
• Major Incident Leadership: Direct critical P1/P2 production incident triage, root cause analysis (RCA), and preventative engineering across Basis, database, network, and application tiers.
4. Security, Compliance & Performance Assurance
• Security & Regulatory Compliance: Enforce stringent baseline security controls in partnership with InfoSec and Internal Audit: Identity and Access Management (GRC, SoD, SAML/SSO), data encryption, network segmentation, and China data handling and cybersecurity regulations.
• Proactive Performance Engineering: Champion an evidence-based performance culture. Guide DB and BTP performance engineers in SQL tuning, PlanViz diagnostics, capacity modeling, stress testing, and observability (Dynatrace, Prometheus, Grafana).

Minimum Qualifications

Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems, or equivalent practical experience.
10+ years of progressive technical experience in SAP enterprise architecture, SAP Basis, or cloud platform engineering.
4+ years of direct people management experience leading technical engineering teams in large-scale, complex enterprise environments.
Proven track record leading hybrid teams combining direct FTEs and external vendor/managed service partners.
In-depth understanding of core SAP landscapes (S/4HANA, ECC, HANA Database Administration, High Availability, Disaster Recovery, System Replication).
Hands-on knowledge of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) ecosystems (Integration Suite, Cloud Foundry/Kyma runtimes, Event-Driven Architectures).
Familiarity with public hyperscaler infrastructure in China (especially Alibaba Cloud) and containerized/DevOps practices.
Operational Excellence: Demonstrated background managing 24x7 mission-critical enterprise production operations, change governance, and high-pressure incident remediation.
Stakeholder & Communication: Exceptional interpersonal, consensus-building, and cross-functional leadership skills across technical, functional, and leadership stakeholders. Professional fluency in both English and Mandarin (written and verbal).

Preferred Qualifications

Experience architecting, running, or migrating SAP systems hosted on Alibaba Cloud or multi-cloud environments.
Solid understanding of China-specific regulatory frameworks governing enterprise IT (Cybersecurity Law, Data Security Law, PIPL).
Experience with enterprise observability and telemetry stacks (Dynatrace, SAP Cloud ALM, Splunk, Grafana).
Strong grasp of modern DevSecOps, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible), and automated testing frameworks.
Formal certifications: SAP BTP, SAP HANA, or Hyperscaler Cloud Architect (Alibaba Cloud / AWS).