Senior SAP Solution Architect and Support Lead

The consultant will ensure the operational continuity, technical integrity, and controlled evolution of UNESCO’s SAP landscape while supporting preparations for its future transformation and migration to SAP S/4HANA and key transformational initiatives. This senior role combines SAP solution and integration architecture, technical team leadership, coordination of SAP support and development, and hands-on SAP development and troubleshooting.

Responsibilities

• Provide overall technical and solution architecture leadership for the SAP domain.
• Ensure the coherence of SAP solutions, interfaces, custom developments, workflows, security dependencies, and related architectural decisions.
• 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, particularly Salesforce, MuleSoft, the external Role Management solution, banking platforms, and custom web applications.
• Maintain the SAP activity backlog and Jira dashboards, ensuring that priorities, ownership, dependencies, risks, and delivery status remain current.
• Prepare and present technical and delivery status updates to management, business owners, project teams, and other stakeholders.
• Facilitate technical decision-making, identify risks and constraints, and escalate matters requiring business or management arbitration.
• Review technical designs, development specifications, code, and implementation plans to ensure compliance with agreed architecture and quality standards.
• Support incident resolution and take direct ownership of complex or critical technical issues where senior-level intervention is required.
• Plan and facilitate co-working workshops with business owners, subject-matter experts, and technical teams to elicit, clarify, challenge, and refine business requirements.
• Analyse existing processes, system behaviour, custom developments, interfaces, reports, controls, and available documentation to identify requirements that may not have been formally captured.
• 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, and work with the relevant stakeholders to obtain clarification and agreement before implementation.
• 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 before development or deployment.
• Support UNESCO’s preparation for a future migration to SAP S/4HANA including inventory and classification of custom SAP code, assessment of compatibility and remediation requirements, analysis of interfaces and workflows, and preparation for Business Partner migration.
• Contribute to the definition of transition options, sequencing, effort estimates, risks, and implementation roadmaps.
• Ensure current enhancements do not unnecessarily increase future migration complexity or technical debt.
• Contribute to the exploration and responsible application of agentic AI and automation within the SAP domain including process-mining, AI-assisted incident analysis, and automation of testing.
• Design, develop, test, document, and maintain custom SAP extensions including hands-on ABAP development and technical troubleshooting.
• 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.

Requirements

• 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.
• 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.
• Strong architectural and analytical capabilities.
• Ability to understand complex end-to-end business processes and translate them into sustainable technical solutions.
• Strong leadership and team-coordination skills, including the ability to lead through technical expertise.
• A pragmatic, hands-on approach and willingness to intervene directly in development and troubleshooting activities.
• Ability to manage several concurrent operational and transformation priorities.
• Sound judgement in balancing urgent business needs, solution quality, technical debt, and longer-term transformation objectives.
• Strong problem-solving and incident-management capabilities.
• Ability to communicate complex technical matters clearly to business stakeholders and senior management.
• Strong documentation and knowledge-transfer skills.
• Ability to work collaboratively in a multicultural and multidisciplinary environment.
• High standards of integrity, accountability, confidentiality, and service orientation.
• Excellent written and spoken English or French and good working knowledge of the other language.
• Knowledge of another UNESCO official language would be an advantage.

Skills

• SAP Solution Architecture
• SAP ECC
• SAP S/4HANA
• SAP Implementation
• SAP integration
• Technical Leadership
• Team Coordination
• Business Analysis
• Requirements Engineering
• Workshop Facilitation
• Technical Planning
• Delivery Reporting
• Incident Management
• Problem Solving
• Financial Systems
• Budget Management
• Multidisciplinary Team Collaboration
• Technical Documentation Production
• SAP ERP Development
• SAP BW production support

Languages

English, French