Lead Technical Consultant - SAP ABAP & S/4HANA

Role overview:

- An experienced SAP ABAP lead consultant is required with deep expertise in classical and modern ABAP development, S/4HANA extensibility, enterprise integration, and technical solution governance to drive complex SAP engineering initiatives across business-critical supply chain, manufacturing, and finance processes for a global dairy and nutrition enterprise.

- The role goes beyond individual development and requires ownership of technical design authority, extensibility strategy, clean-core alignment, code-quality governance, integration architecture, and delivery leadership across application support and transformation programs.

- The consultant is expected to operate as a senior technical lead across business, functional, integration, BASIS, security, and development teams, combining strong hands-on capability with oversight of technical standards, estimation, architecture reviews, release planning, cutover readiness, and hypercare stabilization.

Key responsibilities:

- Own end-to-end technical solution design and delivery for RICEFW objects including reports, interfaces, conversions, enhancements, forms, workflows, APIs, and custom services across ECC and S/4HANA landscapes.

- Lead advanced ABAP development using OO ABAP, CDS views, AMDP, RAP, OData services, BAPIs, BADIs, enhancement frameworks, proxy-based integration, and event-driven or service-oriented patterns aligned to clean-core principles.

- Drive technical architecture decisions for extensibility, balancing in-app and side-by-side approaches, upgrade compatibility, performance, maintainability, and alignment to SAP-standard design patterns.

- Design and govern enterprise integration components across SAP and non-SAP platforms using IDocs, web services, APIs, middleware-connected interfaces, data transformations, and reconciliation or monitoring controls.

- Build and optimize Fiori-enablement back-end services, RAP-based business objects, CDS-based semantic models, analytical views, and custom OData services supporting modern SAP user experiences.

- Lead data migration and conversion development using LTMC, migration cockpit-aligned approaches, LSMW where relevant, BDC techniques, staging logic, and validation frameworks for transformation programs.

- Perform deep performance analysis and remediation across custom developments using SQL trace, runtime analysis, code inspector or ATC-aligned quality checks, buffering strategy, parallelization opportunities, and database-efficient coding approaches.

- Act as the primary technical escalation point for production-critical defects, integration failures, performance degradation, transport issues, and cross-module technical inconsistencies, with structured root-cause analysis and preventive action planning.

- Prepare high-quality technical specifications, design documents, estimation inputs, code-review findings, and deployment plans; govern build quality across internal teams, vendors, and offshore delivery units.

- Lead SIT, UAT support, defect remediation, mock cutovers, transport sequencing, deployment execution, hypercare stabilization, and transition into steady-state support.

- Collaborate with functional consultants across SD, MM, WM, PP, FI, CO, and Treasury domains to translate complex business requirements into scalable and supportable technical solutions.

- Mentor junior developers, establish development frameworks and reusable assets, enforce coding standards, and provide technical leadership in architecture forums, design reviews, and engineering governance meetings.

Mandatory skills:

1. Core ABAP and technical delivery:

- Deep hands-on expertise in OO ABAP, modularization techniques, reports, dialog programming, enhancements, BADIs, user exits, BAPIs, IDocs, proxies, Smartforms, Adobe Forms, workflows, and transport management.

- Strong capability in end-to-end RICEFW delivery across design, build, unit testing, documentation, release support, and post-go-live stabilization.

2. Modern ABAP and S/4HANA extensibility:

- Strong experience with CDS views, AMDP, RAP, OData, embedded analytics enablement, and S/4HANA-oriented development patterns for scalable, upgrade-aware custom solutions.

- Clear understanding of clean-core principles, extensibility options, technical debt reduction, and modernization of custom code during ECC-to-S/4HANA transitions.

3. Integration and performance engineering:

- Proven experience designing and supporting interfaces across SAP and non-SAP applications using IDoc, API, proxy, file-based, and middleware-enabled patterns.

- Strong performance-tuning expertise across SQL, ABAP runtime optimization, memory handling, and large-volume transaction or batch-processing scenarios.

4. Implementation and leadership:

- Proven experience in multiple full-lifecycle SAP implementations, major rollouts, or transformation programmes, with additional ownership in AMS stabilization and enterprise technical governance.

- Demonstrated ability to lead technical workshops, challenge non-scalable designs, review solution quality, estimate delivery effort, and govern execution across onsite, offshore, and third-party teams.

- Strong experience with release management, change governance, defect triage, cutover planning, retrofit considerations, transport controls, and service transition.

Domain expectations:

- Experience supporting development across food, dairy, nutrition, manufacturing, supply-chain, and finance processes in high-volume, interface-heavy SAP environments.

- Practical understanding of audit-sensitive change management, regulated process controls, and the need for resilient technical solutions in business-critical operations.

- Ability to design reusable technical assets that support process standardization and long-term maintainability across global programmes.

Preferred qualifications:

- Exposure to SAP Fiori or UI5 fundamentals, SAP BTP extensibility concepts, and RAP-based application development is strongly preferred.

- Hands-on experience with S/4HANA greenfield or brownfield transformation programmes and custom-code remediation is desirable.

- SAP ABAP or S/4HANA development certification is a plus.

Soft skills:

- Excellent stakeholder management, workshop facilitation, structured communication, and technical documentation capability.

- Strong analytical problem solving, ownership mindset, delivery rigor, and ability to operate effectively in a fast-paced global support and transformation environment.

- Ability to balance architectural thinking with deep hands-on execution, quality discipline, and production support accountability.

(ref:hirist.tech)