Job Title: SAP Technical Architects
Locations: Germany (Bonn + 250km), Malaysia
Lemongrass Consulting (www.lemongrassconsulting.com) is the leading professional and managed service provider of SAP enterprise applications running on AWS hyper-scale cloud infrastructure. Our objective is to delight our customers every day by reducing the cost and increasing the agility of their SAP systems. We do this with our continuous innovation, automation, migration, and operation, delivered on the world’s most comprehensive cloud platform, AWS. We have been working with AWS since 2010 and we are a Premier Amazon Partner Network (or APN) Consulting Partner. We are also an SAP Certified Silver Partner.
Our team is what makes Lemongrass exceptional and why we have an excellent reputation in the market that we enjoy today. At Lemongrass, you will work with the smartest and most motivated people in the business. We take pride in our culture of innovation and collaboration that drives us to deliver exceptional benefits to our clients every day.
Summary: As a customer-obsessed organization, the role of the Technical Architect is the single most important role with Lemongrass and requires a broad spectrum of skills, passion, and commitment being both the technical lead, the customer trusted advisor, and the face of the world-leading SAP on AWS organization.
Responsibilities:
As Technical Architect you will take a lead role across a range of customer with responsibility for:
- Designing and Planning and delivering current and future SAP environment.
- Develop and maintain the Technical Architecture approach, including development of Technical Architecture Road Maps and Standards, Sizing Standards, Change Control Standards etc.
- Work with Business and Project Representatives to understand Technical Architecture performance, availability and recovery requirements and translate those in agreed SLAs and KPIs.
- Work with Process and Functional leads in SAP project to understand the Solution Architecture.
- Derive suitable SAP and non-SAP Products, Versions and Maintenance Plans to support the Solution Architecture.
- Work with Hardware, Hosting & Infrastructure, as well as the Support Service Partners to understand preferred technologies and capabilities.
- Establish Technical Architecture Blueprint, including Server and SAN Infrastructure.
- Establish Disaster Recovery Strategy based on Target SLAs and KPIs and agreed.
- Establish the Release Management Strategy
- Develop the SAP Landscape Build and Deployment Plan including Logical System
- Develop the Change and Release Management Plan
- Work with the Project and Business as Usual teams, the external Technical Service Partner and the internal Infrastructure & Hosting team to define and implement the overall Technical Plan.
- Ensure the applicable teams deploy good SAP practice in operating the solution and advice clients accordingly
Qualifications:
A successful Technical Architect within Lemongrass must have experience across four key pillars;
1. Technical Heritage: Have broad experience across all key areas of SAP Architecture with a minimum of 10 years’ experience in technical architecture design. Which should include:
- Deep technical experience of SAP migrations and be able to demonstrate experience in a broad range of cutover technical approaches including Heterogenous, homogeneous, SUM DMO and near Zero Downtime models.
- Should be able to demonstrate and show reference examples of deep technical understanding of SAP Platform technologies such as the SAP Suite, BI, reporting and UI technologies across a variety of database types.
- Should possess deep experience with SAP cross-platform sizing able to translate exiting on-premise models to x64 centric cloud workloads.
- Must have demonstrable experience within SAP in Memory platform technology such as HANA2.0 and SAP S4.
- Be able to demonstrate experience across a range of platforms and database types including SAP ASE, x64, AIX, HP-UX, Wintel platforms and show experience administering and architecting into Linux (SuSE / RHEL).
- Should be able to architect and describe network design including but not limited to CIDR ranges, architecting across private networks, interconnectivity across IPSEC & AWS Direct Connect circuits.
- Be able to demonstrate experience and/or working knowledge of working within Amazon Web Service, the exclusive platform leveraged within Lemongrass. This should include:
- Working with AWS VPC networking
- Demonstrate knowledge of AWS building blocks (EC2, NLBs, S3, Glacier, EBS, AWS Disk Architectures such as Io1, GP2 etc)
- Landing Zone Concepts
- Cloud Transformation templating / SNS / SQS
- Is technically inquisitive, is always learning, asking questions and is constantly learning.
- Passionate about innovation: Cloud is always evolving, on average SAP release 100’s of new updates a year, AWS release over 1000 per year. A successful TA in Lemongrass should remain inquisitive, open-minded, and never stop learning. As such skills in these additional areas would be a bonus:
- Big Data and Data Lake architecture concepts both in AWS and SAP technologies
- Machine Learning & IoT concepts and AWS offerings.
- Storage technology – S3, Glacier, Deep Glacier etc.
- Extension services – AWS Polly, Deeplens, Sagemaker.
- SAP DevOps automation.
2. Customer-facing: A Technical Architect in Lemongrass is the primary contact and trusted advisor to both our customers and prospects, customer-facing experience is a vital skill to a successful TA application and should include evidence experience of:
- CXO level relationship engagement, the ability to talk at a business level to senior stakeholders within an organization.
- Excellent presentations skills, ability to design and execute detailed design workshops relevant to customer requirements.
- Able to translate between SAP & AWS technical terms, designs and concepts to plain English, coaching and helping customers & partners these highly complex areas in plain English.
- Must be a team player. Lemongrass operate in a pattern-based way of working which allows consistency, scalability and drives our automation first strategy. Being able to work, collaborate and ensure designs and innovation feedback into the organization.
3. Commercially aware: Designing and modelling the solution to the customer key drivers and criteria, for example, an overengineered solution will not be successful in a cost sensitive customer so the successful applicant must be able to demonstrate:
- Commercial experience designing, modeling and describing landscapes.
- Be able to translate the customer’s key requirements into a suitable commercially compatible technical design.
- Have awareness of AWS pricing strategies and models including Reserved Instance, Convertible Reserved Instances, On-demand and Spot models and how best to apply them into a migration engagement.
- Be aware of cloud commercial optimization within designs such as scheduling, on-demand builds and storage patterns.
- An understanding of SAP licensing models would also be a benefit.
4. Amazon core Values: We have found many similarities between Amazon core values and those of Lemongrass. We have adopted and adapted their core values as they align to our core values, a successful candidate must also align to these:
- Customer & Partner Obsession – We start with our customer & partners and work backwards; ask yourself how you would feel if. We make it easy for customer to leave and fight to keep them every day. We work vigorously to earn and keep customer & partner trust. Although we pay attention to competitors and internal processes, we obsess over our customers & partners.
- Frugality – Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense. When we make a cost saving, we share it back with our customers. We can keep our margins lower as our overhead is lower.
- Good Place to Work – What we do is easy with a team of excellent, happy, motivated and empowered people. We as managers put our people first. We work hard to understand and optimise the employee experience. We build hands-on, multi-skilled, motivated and aligned teams which will make it easier for all of us to deliver to our customer requirements. We make sure we can focus on people that can and want to push the company forward.
- Hire and Develop the Best – Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognise exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. From the first day of joining Lemongrass.
- Vision – Leaders know where they are going. They energize their teams to that goal and create clarity, focus and cohesion. They set aggressive targets to achieve the vision. They don’t give up.
- Ownership & Accountability – Leaders are owners and display a high level of accountability. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job”. They do what they say and use all means to ensure that.
- Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit – Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.
- Are Focused; Deliver Results – Leaders focus on the key operational outputs from their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. They don’t get distracted and are masters in prioritising. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
- Invent and Simplify – Leaders expect and require innovation and invention from themselves and their teams and always find ways to simplify. They are externally aware, look for new ideas from everywhere, and are not limited by “not invented here”. They Google. A lot. As we do new things, we accept that we may be misunderstood for long periods of time.
- Dive Deep – Leaders operate at all levels, stay connected to the details, audit frequently, understand the value of evidence and are skeptical when metrics and anecdotes differ. No task is beneath them. The dive deep when they must, and stay high when they can.
- Are Right, A Lot – Leaders are right a lot. They have strong judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs.
- Learn and Be Curious – Leaders are never done learning and always seek to improve themselves. They are curious about new possibilities and act to explore them. They recognise each day, each action, each issue as a learning opportunity. They facilitate learning behaviours for their teams.
- Insist on the Highest Standards – Leaders have relentlessly high standards – many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and driving their teams to deliver high quality products, services and processes. Leaders ensure that issues do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed.
- Think Big – Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers & partners.
- Bias for Action – Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.
- Earn Trust – Leaders listen attentively, speak candidly, and treat others respectfully. They are vocally self-critical, even when doing so is awkward or embarrassing. They benchmark themselves and their teams against the best.
Lemongrass Consulting is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer. All qualified candidates will receive consideration for employment without regard to disability, protected veteran status, race, color, religious creed, national origin, citizenship, marital status, sex, sexual orientation/gender identity, age, or genetic information. The selected applicant will be subject to a background investigation.
