Senior Manager — Global SAP ABAP & BTP Development Lead

Xylem is a Fortune 500 global water solutions company dedicated to advancing sustainable impact and empowering the people who make water work every day. As a leading water technology company with 23,000 employees operating in over 150 countries, Xylem is at the forefront of addressing the world's most critical water challenges. We invite passionate individuals to join our team, dedicated to exceeding customer expectations through innovative and sustainable solutions.

This role provides leadership for custom application development, integrations, extensions, automation, and innovation capabilities within the SAP ecosystem. The position ensures all enhancements are developed using modern SAP architecture principles while minimizing technical debt and preserving clean-core strategies. As guardian of SAP extensibility and platform innovation, the role enables business differentiation without compromising system stability. The leader drives adoption of SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) capabilities to accelerate digital innovation and future scalability. This capability is essential to ensure the transformed ERP environment remains adaptable to evolving business requirements.

Development leadership

● Lead a global ABAP and BTP engineering team across onshore and offshore, spanning template build,

deployment wave support, and sustaining engineering.

● Own the technical backlog, capacity plan, and delivery commitments across product domains, working directly

with functional solution owners and process leads.

● Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, performance, security, ATC checks, peer review, unit

testing, and documentation.

● Establish CI/CD pipelines, transport governance, and release management across the landscape, with quality

gates enforced in the pipeline rather than in review meetings.

Clean core custodianship

● Own the extensibility decision framework and act as approval authority for any classical modification or in-core

enhancement, with escalation rather than absorption when the standard is challenged.

● Drive extensions to key-user and developer extensibility, side-by-side on BTP, and released SAP APIs and BAdIs.

● Own custom code lifecycle management: inventory, usage analytics, remediation, retirement, and continuous

reduction of the custom footprint. Custom code is a liability with a carrying cost, and you own the trend line.

● Ensure the landscape stays upgrade-ready so RISE release cycles and innovation adoption remain routine.

BTP platform ownership

● Own the BTP architecture and its services — Integration Suite, Build, Application Development (CAP/RAP),

Event Mesh, Workflow, Business Rules, and Datasphere where relevant.

● Establish BTP governance: subaccount and space design, entitlement management, identity and

authorization, DevOps tooling, and cost transparency by consumer.

● Build the API and event layer that exposes core business capability safely to satellite applications, partners,

and AI services.

● Provide the technical foundation for AI and agent enablement — Joule extensibility, AI Core and AI Foundation

services, and integration patterns that are production-grade rather than demo-grade.

Reusable assets and enablement

● Build and maintain the golden path: reference architectures, code templates, integration patterns, security

patterns, and shared services that teams consume rather than rebuild.

● Support deployment waves through interface build, conversion support objects, performance tuning, and

hypercare defect resolution.

● Partner with security on authorization design, SoD-safe development, and evidence generation through GRC.

● Manage system integrator and AMS partner engineering quality, staffing continuity, and adherence to Xylem standards.

Qualifications

Required

● 15+ years in SAP technical development, with at least 5 years leading global engineering teams.

● Deep, current, hands-on ABAP expertise: ABAP for Cloud, RAP, CDS views, OData, AMDP, OO ABAP, and

performance optimization on HANA. You must still be able to read and judge code, not only manage people who write it.

● Proven SAP BTP delivery: CAP or RAP applications, Integration Suite, Event Mesh, and BTP security and

identity models in production.

● Demonstrated clean core implementation on S/4HANA, with a track record of reducing custom footprint rather

than simply documenting it.

● Experience with SAP Fiori and UI5 development and extensibility.

● Strong command of ATC, custom code migration tooling, and code quality automation.

● Transport and release management at scale across multi-wave global deployments.

● Ability to hold an architectural line under business and partner pressure, with the credibility to explain the cost

of an exception in business terms.

Preferred

● RISE with SAP private or public cloud experience.

● SAP Cloud ALM, Signavio, and Datasphere familiarity.

● AI and ML integration on BTP, including AI Core, AI Foundation, and Joule extensibility.

● Manufacturing or industrial sector complexity: variant configuration, service and installed-base processes plant-level integration.

● SAP certification in ABAP Cloud, BTP Developer, or BTP Architecture.

Success in the First 12 Months

A published and enforced extensibility standard with a measurable reduction in in-core modifications. A BTP

landscape with governed entitlements, identity, DevOps, and cost transparency. A reusable asset library that

teams actually adopt. Transport and release cycles that are predictable and audit-clean. And an upgrade-ready

core, proven by a routine release adoption with no remediation program attached.

Operating Principles You Will Work Under

● Products, not projects. Persistent teams aligned to value streams, funded by capacity rather than project

cycles, each paired with a business process owner accountable for the outcome.

● Clean core is non-negotiable. Extensions live on BTP, the core stays standard, and custom code is

governed at the point of creation.

● Paved road, not toll booth . Golden paths, reference architectures, and reusable patterns, with guardrails

enforced in the pipeline rather than in a design authority meeting.

● Compliance by default. Controls are designed into the platform and evidenced automatically, so control

integrity holds at deployment scale.

● Accountable for value, not volume . Success is measured in business process KPIs, adoption, and realized

value, not tickets closed or hours delivered.

● Intelligent enterprise by design . AI and agent enablement, and the data readiness that makes both credible,

are owned capabilities.

● Global template authority, local execution. Template integrity is held centrally through the current

deployment horizon, with a defined path to greater product-team autonomy.

Join the global Xylem team to be a part of innovative technology solutions transforming water usage, conservation, and re-use. Our products impact public utilities, industrial sectors, residential areas, and commercial buildings, with a commitment to providing smart metering, network technologies, and advanced analytics for water, electric, and gas utilities. Partner with us in creating a world where water challenges are met with ingenuity and dedication; where we recognize the power of inclusion and belonging in driving innovation and allowing us to compete more effectively around the world.