Senior SAP Infrastructure Engineer

Team/Opportunity:

The Senior Infrastructure Engineer will be responsible for managing, automating, optimizing, and improving the SAP infrastructure estate hosted primarily on Microsoft Azure. The role will support both business-as-usual operations and strategic platform transformation activities across SAP landscapes, including S/4HANA, legacy SAP, HANA databases, application servers, high availability environments, disaster recovery, backup, monitoring, patching, and cost optimization.

The role requires strong technical ownership, hands-on engineering capability, operational discipline, and a continuous improvement mindset. The successful candidate will be expected to move the platform from manual and reactive operations toward automation, standardization, resilience, and cost-efficient service delivery.

Key Responsibilities:

SAP Infrastructure Operations

Manage and support SAP infrastructure environments hosted on Azure, including SAP application servers, HANA database servers, Web Dispatchers, high availability setups, and disaster recovery environments.

Provide technical support for BAU operations, incidents, service requests, changes, maintenance windows, and problem management.

Troubleshoot infrastructure issues across Linux, Azure, storage, backup, monitoring, networking, and SAP platform components.

Support critical incidents and major incident management calls by providing technical analysis, recovery actions, and clear updates.

Ensure SAP infrastructure services remain stable, secure, resilient, and aligned with operational requirements.

Automation and Engineering

Design, develop, and maintain automation for SAP infrastructure operations using tools such as Ansible, PowerShell, Azure CLI, Bicep, Terraform, GitHub Actions, or equivalent technologies.

Automate repetitive operational activities such as patching, server validation, health checks, backup checks, disk/filesystem cleanup, monitoring checks, and reporting.

Build reusable scripts, templates, runbooks, and pipelines to reduce manual effort and improve consistency.

Identify opportunities to move BAU activities toward zero-touch or low-touch operations.

Promote infrastructure-as-code practices across the SAP estate.

Azure Platform Management

Manage Azure infrastructure components supporting SAP workloads, including virtual machines, disks, storage accounts, NetApp Files, networking, backup, monitoring, identities, and automation services.

Support Azure resource lifecycle management, including provisioning, scaling, rightsizing, tagging, cleanup, and decommissioning.

Review Azure platform configuration for performance, resilience, security, and cost efficiency.

Work with architecture and cloud platform teams to implement approved design patterns and operational standards.

Cost Optimization

Identify and drive Azure cost optimisation opportunities across the SAP estate.

Analyse resource utilisation and recommend rightsizing, scheduling, reservation, storage optimisation, backup retention changes, and decommissioning opportunities.

Support cost governance by ensuring new infrastructure requests are justified, reviewed, and aligned with the platform’s cost control principles.

Contribute to monthly cost reviews, savings tracking, and optimisation reporting.

Resilience, Backup, and Disaster Recovery

Support high availability and disaster recovery design, testing, and operational readiness for SAP workloads.

Validate backup coverage, restore readiness, monitoring, and operational recovery procedures.

Identify gaps in backup, replication, failover, and recovery processes and propose improvements.

Participate in resiliency tests and ensure outcomes, risks, and follow-up actions are documented and tracked.

Patching and Lifecycle Management

Support OS patching, SAP infrastructure patching, kernel updates, and related maintenance activities.

Automate and standardise patching processes for SAP landscapes, including both HA and Non-HA environments.

Ensure pre-checks, post-checks, validation steps, rollback plans, and documentation are consistently followed.

Support OS upgrade and migration initiatives, including RHEL lifecycle activities.

Monitoring, Incident Reduction, and Problem Management

Improve monitoring, alerting, and operational dashboards for SAP infrastructure.

Analyse recurring incidents and alerts to identify permanent fixes.

Reduce alert noise, manual intervention, and repeated service interruptions.

Drive problem management actions through root-cause analysis, preventive fixes, documentation, and automation.

Documentation and Governance

Maintain accurate technical documentation, operational runbooks, architecture diagrams, SOPs, change records, and Jira updates.

Ensure all work is tracked clearly through Jira, ServiceNow, or agreed team processes.

Follow change, incident, access, security, and operational governance processes.

Provide clear communication on status, blockers, risks, timelines, and closure updates.

Collaboration and Stakeholder Management

Work closely with SAP Basis, application teams, architecture, cloud platform, security, monitoring, backup, network, and vendor teams.

Provide technical input into design discussions, project planning, operational readiness, and implementation reviews.

Support junior engineers through knowledge sharing, technical guidance, and review of operational practices.

Build trusted relationships with stakeholders through reliable delivery, proactive communication, and strong ownership.

Required Skills and Experience:

Technical Skills

Strong experience managing enterprise infrastructure workloads on Microsoft Azure.

Good understanding of SAP infrastructure concepts, including SAP application servers, HANA databases, Web Dispatchers, HA/DR, backups, and operational dependencies.

Strong Linux administration experience, preferably RHEL.

Experience with automation tools such as Ansible, PowerShell, Azure CLI, Bicep, Terraform, or equivalent.

Experience with Azure virtual machines, disks, networking, storage, monitoring, backup, identity, and cost management.

Understanding of HA clustering, failover, replication, and disaster recovery concepts.

Experience with infrastructure monitoring, alerting, incident management, and problem management.

Experience working with Jira, ServiceNow, GitHub, or similar delivery and operational tooling.

Operational Skills

Strong troubleshooting and root-cause analysis skills.

Ability to manage incidents, changes, risks, and operational escalations.

Ability to identify recurring issues and convert them into permanent fixes or automation opportunities.

Strong documentation and runbook creation skills.

Ability to work in structured change windows and support critical production activities.

Strong understanding of service availability, SLA, operational risk, and customer impact.

Behavioural Skills

Strong ownership and accountability.

Delivery-focused and outcome-oriented mindset.

Proactive approach to communication, risk management, and issue resolution.

Ability to work independently with limited supervision.

Strong collaboration with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Continuous improvement mindset with focus on automation, optimisation, and standardisation.

Ability to guide and support junior team members.

Preferred Skills

Experience supporting SAP workloads on Azure.

Experience with Azure NetApp Files or enterprise storage platforms.

Experience with SAP HANA infrastructure operations.

Experience with backup and restore technologies for SAP/HANA workloads.

Experience with GitHub Actions or CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation.

Experience with Azure Cost Management, reservations, rightsizing, and optimisation reporting.

Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering tools for documentation, scripting,