Engineering Director

Director of Engineering
Procure-to-Pay — S/4HANA Migration & Process Automation
Location
Bangalore, India — leading globally distributed teams
The role
Our Procure-to-Pay process runs today on SAP ECC across a large number of operating countries, each with its own local configuration, local tax and statutory requirements, local supplier base and its own accumulated set of workarounds. We are migrating that estate to SAP S/4HANA country by country. At the same time, a significant share of the manual effort in P2P sits outside SAP altogether — in invoice intake, exception handling, supplier queries, reconciliation and approvals — and we are building that automation as engineered services in Java, Python and AI, running off the SAP platform and integrating into it.
This role owns both. You will lead approximately 100 engineers globally through a layer of engineering managers and technical leads, based in Bangalore, which is our largest engineering location for this domain. One organisation, two connected mandates: land the S/4HANA migration wave by wave without disrupting the countries that depend on it, and build the off-platform automation that makes the process progressively touchless — so that each country arrives on S/4HANA better automated than it left ECC.
This is a leader-of-leaders role. You will spend your time on delivering priorities, direction, architecture, sequencing, risk and people — not on writing the code yourself — but you must be technical enough that senior engineers and architects want your opinion.
What you will own
Multi-country ECC to S/4HANA migration for Procure-to-Pay
Own end-to-end engineering delivery of the P2P migration from SAP ECC to S/4HANA across multiple countries — wave planning and sequencing, scope per country, dependencies on Finance and adjacent process migrations, and the critical path.
Lead the engineering side of every country cutover: data migration and cleansing for suppliers, open POs, open invoices and contracts; mock cutovers and dress rehearsals; go / no-go criteria; cutover execution windows; and hypercare with a defined exit bar.
Drive convergence, not replication. Each country arrives on a common global P2P template with localisation only where tax, statutory or regulatory requirements genuinely demand it — and you are accountable for holding that line against local pressure to rebuild old habits.
Own the custom-code agenda through the migration: assess the ECC custom object inventory, retire what standard S/4HANA now covers, and rebuild the remainder as clean-core extensions on BTP or via released APIs rather than core modifications.
Own migration risk transparently — dual-run periods, reconciliation between ECC and S/4HANA, regression automation across countries already live, and rollback plans that have actually been tested.
Keep the ECC estate stable and compliant for the countries not yet migrated, including statutory and tax changes landing mid-programme, while the migration proceeds.
Off-platform Procure-to-Pay automation in Java, Python, open source software engineering tech stack and AI
Lead the teams building P2P automation outside the SAP platform: invoice and document intake, workflow and orchestration services, supplier self-service portals, exception handling and reconciliation tooling, approval routing, and the integration layer into S/4HANA and ECC.
Own these as products, engineered to a real standard — Java and Python services, event-driven and API-based integration, cloud-native deployment, automated testing, observability and on-call — rather than as scripts and spreadsheets that grew.
Set and execute the AI agenda for P2P: intelligent document processing for invoices and order confirmations, automated three-way match and exception resolution, GL and cost-object coding prediction, duplicate and anomaly detection, supplier query handling, and agentic workflows that resolve low-risk exceptions end to end.
Own the engineering discipline that makes AI safe inside a financial process: accuracy baselines and evaluation harnesses before rollout, confidence thresholds with human-in-the-loop routing, model and prompt versioning, drift monitoring, full auditability of every automated decision, and defined fallback behaviour.
Design the automation layer to be migration-agnostic — abstracted from whether a given country sits on ECC or S/4HANA — so that automation is not rebuilt with every wave and does not become a blocker to cutover.
Retire deliberately: replace brittle RPA and manual workarounds with standard S/4HANA capability or supported services, and switch off automation that is no longer earning its keep.
Architecture, engineering craft and platform health
Bring one architectural view to the domain — clear API and event contracts between SAP and the off-platform services, a single source of truth for supplier and material master data, and a documented target state that teams build towards.
Raise the engineering bar across both halves of the organisation: trunk-based development, CI/CD to production, infrastructure as code, automated regression coverage for SAP as well as custom code, drive implementation of AI DevX capabilities, and observability that surfaces process failures before Accounts Payable reports them.
Be accountable for the non-functional posture: performance under month-end and quarter-end load, availability, disaster recovery, release and upgrade readiness.
Own security, data privacy and control compliance for the domain with Security, Internal Audit and Data Protection: access models, segregation of duties, SOX-relevant controls in the P2P flow, secrets handling, and data residency across countries.
Manage system integrators and engineering partners — scope, quality gates, knowledge transfer and the in-house / partner balance — to the same standard as internal teams.
Leading leaders and building the organisation
Lead through 5–8 engineering managers and principal-level technical leads: set direction, coach them as managers, run a real performance and talent cycle, and hold a high bar on both hiring and addressing underperformance.
Design the organisation for the work — durable teams owning clear domains, sensible follow-the-sun and on-call coverage across Bangalore and other locations, and a deliberate reduction in hand-offs and single points of knowledge.
Build the Bangalore centre as a genuine engineering hub for this domain, not a delivery back-office: senior technical depth held locally, real ownership of architecture and outcomes, and a strong pipeline of engineering leadership talent.
Grow capability where it is thin — SAP-adjacent modern engineering, AI engineering, test automation, SRE — through hiring, internal mobility and structured upskilling.
Create the conditions for engineers across time zones to do their best work: clarity of ownership, written communication, low-friction ways of working, and a culture where problems surface early rather than at cutover.
Business partnership and delivery accountability
Partner as an equal with Procurement, Finance Operations, Accounts Payable, Shared Services, country finance leadership and the S/4HANA programme — shaping and challenging demand, not simply receiving it.
Own annual and quarterly planning, the investment case and the run-rate cost for the domain; make trade-offs between migration, new automation, technical debt and reliability explicit and defend them with data.
Be the escalation point for major P2P incidents, cutover issues and period-close risk, and own the follow-through on root causes.
Represent the domain credibly to executive stakeholders, country leadership and auditors — translating engineering reality into business consequence without hiding behind complexity.
What you bring
Essential
Substantial engineering leadership experience at scale, including proven experience as a leader of leaders — managing engineering managers, not only individual contributors — for organisations of comparable size (typically 100+ engineers).
Direct, hands-on-the-programme experience of SAP ECC to S/4HANA migration in a multi-country or multi-entity landscape — data migration, cutover engineering, localisation, hypercare — with real accountability for outcomes, not advisory involvement.
Deep delivery experience in the SAP Procure-to-Pay or Source-to-Pay domain, including S/4HANA MM, sourcing, contracting and invoice management, and an understanding of clean-core extension patterns and BTP.
Genuine software engineering credibility in modern stacks — hands-on background in Java and/or Python, distributed systems, API and event-driven integration, cloud-native delivery — sufficient to make architectural calls and earn senior engineers' trust.
Practical experience taking AI or machine learning into production business processes, including how such systems are evaluated, monitored, controlled and audited. Familiarity with LLM-based document and workflow automation is expected.
A track record of leading globally distributed teams across time zones and cultures, including work with system integrators and managed-service partners.
Based in or willing to relocate to Bangalore, with excellent written and spoken English.
Preferred
Exposure to logistics, shipping, transport or another asset-heavy, high-transaction-volume, multi-country industry.
A career spanning both the package/ERP world and the product-engineering world — this rol

Work arrangement
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