Senior SAP Solution Architect and Support Lead
Overview
The consultant will ensure the operational continuity, technical integrity, and controlled evolution of UNESCO’s SAP landscape, supporting its future transformation and migration to SAP S/4HANA.
Key Responsibilities
- Provide overall technical and solution architecture leadership for the SAP domain.
- Lead and coordinate the work of the internal SAP team and relevant external consultants.
- Plan, prioritize, assign, and monitor SAP support, maintenance, development, and transformation activities.
- Coordinate dependencies between SAP and other corporate platforms.
- Maintain the SAP activity backlog and Jira dashboards.
- Prepare and present technical and delivery status updates.
- Facilitate technical decision-making, identify risks and constraints, and escalate matters.
- Review technical designs, development specifications, code, and implementation plans.
- Support incident resolution and take direct ownership of complex or critical technical issues.
- Plan and facilitate co-working workshops with business owners, subject-matter experts, and technical teams.
- Analyse existing processes, system behaviour, custom developments, interfaces, reports, controls, and available documentation.
- Translate business needs and workshop outcomes into structured process definitions, functional specifications, user stories, acceptance criteria, solution designs, and technical requirements.
- Identify gaps, ambiguities, inconsistencies, dependencies, and decisions required.
- Maintain traceability between agreed business requirements, functional specifications, technical designs, development activities, and test scenarios.
- Support business stakeholders in validating and formally confirming the refined requirements and proposed solution.
- Support UNESCO’s preparation for a future migration to SAP S/4HANA, including inventory and classification of custom SAP code, identification of obsolete developments, assessment of custom-code compatibility, analysis of interfaces, workflows, enhancements, reports, forms, and external dependencies, assessment of migration impact, preparation for Business Partner migration, and contribution to transition options, sequencing, effort estimates, risks, and implementation roadmaps.
- Contribute to the exploration and responsible application of agentic AI and automation within the SAP domain, including use of process-mining approaches, design of AI-assisted capabilities, and exploration of agents capable of supporting technical and functional analysis.
- Automate testing for custom web applications using Playwright or equivalent technologies.
- Develop reusable test scenarios and integrate automated testing into relevant delivery and quality-assurance processes.
- Design, develop, test, document, and maintain custom SAP extensions.
- Perform hands-on ABAP development and technical troubleshooting where required.
- Develop or modify interfaces, services, reports, workflows, enhancements, forms, Gateway services, and related SAP components.
- Review developments produced by other team members or external providers.
- Ensure adherence to development, security, performance, transport, testing, and documentation standards.
- Support deployments and provide advanced production support for critical issues.
Required Experience
A minimum of 10 years of progressively responsible professional experience in SAP architecture, implementation, development, integration, and production support. Demonstrated experience in a senior SAP technical leadership, solution architecture, or team-lead role. Demonstrated ability to combine architectural leadership and coordination responsibilities with hands-on technical delivery. Significant experience with complex, mature, and highly customized SAP ECC environments. Relevant experience in public-sector or international-organization financial and budget-management environments. Demonstrated experience supporting business-critical SAP operations involving multiple company codes, banking arrangements, workflows, interfaces, and external applications. Experience coordinating multidisciplinary teams and external service providers. Experience preparing technical plans, delivery dashboards, status reports, and presentations for technical and non-technical stakeholders. Demonstrated experience in business analysis and requirements engineering in environments where initial requirements may be incomplete, evolving, or not formally documented. Proven ability to facilitate collaborative workshops, guide stakeholders through complex business and system processes, and progressively translate business needs into clear and implementable functional specifications. Experience deriving and validating requirements through analysis of existing system behaviour, custom code, interfaces, workflows, reports, business controls, and stakeholder knowledge.
Qualifications
An advanced university degree in computer science, information systems, engineering, finance systems, business administration, or another relevant discipline. A first-level university degree combined with additional relevant professional experience may be accepted in lieu of an advanced degree.