Director, Solutions Engineering (SAP Hana performance)

The Opportunity

We are looking for an SAP HANA Performance Team Leader to plan, execute, and validate the performance of SAP HANA on Nutanix AHV and AOS. This role is responsible for qualifying our software to meet SAP benchmark targets and certifying third-party OEM servers for inclusion in SAP’s certified hardware directory.

About the Team

Nutanix's Solutions & Performance Engineering team is a globally distributed organization of architects, performance engineers, and industry specialists focused on validating, optimizing, and accelerating customer success across strategic workloads and industry ecosystems.

Your Role

• Manage a team of remote employees and subcontractors to benchmark SAP HANA and other SAP software components on bare-metal servers. Virtualize similar configurations on Nutanix AHV using the same hardware to identify and improve performance differences between virtualization and bare metal.
• Deploy and troubleshoot various SAP HANA configurations, and establish and document the Nutanix best practices for this workload.
• Identify new strategies and configurations to improve SAP HANA performance on new software versions and denser hardware specifications that expose performance issues in the platform software.
• Work with core engineering teams to troubleshoot performance issues impacting SAP HANA and determine root causes that can be corrected through code changes.
• Deploy new hardware infrastructure in the SAP Linux lab in Walldorf, Germany, and manage infrastructure dependencies.
• Build strong relationships at SAP Headquarters in Walldorf, Germany to gain support from key stakeholders.
• Align Nutanix strategic outcomes with SAP strategic outcomes and influence SAP stakeholders to support Nutanix goals.
• Guide teams in using SAP HANA test harness tools, including SAP validation and certification suites. Serve as a subject matter expert to support performance teams in qualifying and certifying our solution.
• Analyze results from SAP validation and certification suites, compare them to SAP's KPI thresholds, diagnose failures, and drive issues to root cause across the full stack.
• Provision, configure, and troubleshoot SAP HANA parameters, SLES/RHEL for SAP tuning, vCPU/NUMA topology, kernel scheduling, general storage topologies, virtual storage controllers, and network fabrics.
• Experience with automating hardware and software deployments, infrastructure as code, and APIs.
• Ability to explore how AI can be used to automate processes further using advanced AI models.
• Understand the impact of new CPU and memory innovations on SAP HANA workloads and how Nutanix AHV and AOS must evolve to achieve performance benchmarks close to bare metal.
• Understand both scale-up and scale-out HANA and other key architectures of the SAP HANA database.
• Assist in producing written artifacts including SAP Notes, best practice guides, test plans, and KPI result packages for SAP submissions.
• Develop sizing guidelines, configuration recommendations, and reference architectures for SAP HANA on Nutanix AHV/AOS.
• Help customers and Nutanix sellers on large deals involving SAP HANA.
• Work with hardware OEMs to enable them to achieve their own hardware validations for SAP HANA with Nutanix.
• Assist with Nutanix support escalations.

What You Will Bring

• 5+ years in SAP HANA infrastructure or general database performance engineering, with at least 2 years focused on virtualized HANA.
• Deep Linux OS experience
• Experience with Nutanix HCI
• Performance monitoring tools
• Hands-on experience running SAP HANA test harness validation and certification suites, interpreting KPI results, especially storage latency and throughput tests, and understanding the reasons for test failures.
• Working knowledge of SAP HANA, the SAP HANA hardware directory, and, ideally, SAP's certification requirements for HCI and virtualized deployments.
• Strong Linux performance skills on SLES for SAP or RHEL for SAP, including hugepages, C-states and power governors, NUMA topology, SNC2, I/O schedulers, and the standard observability toolkit (perf, sar, iostat, blktrace, numastat, ftrace).
• Practical experience with virtualization performance, including CPU pinning and NUMA alignment, vCPU-to-pCPU ratios, memory reservation, and virtual storage and network path behavior.
• Nutanix AHV/AOS experience is strongly preferred. ESXi or KVM experience will be considered if the candidate can demonstrate relevant expertise.
• Comfortable with distributed storage concepts, including replication factor, data locality, write path and oplog behavior, and understanding latency percentiles.
• Scripting for automation and analysis (Python, Bash) and familiarity with Ansible or Terraform for repeatable lab builds.
• Excellent communication skills in both English and German, with the ability to engage meaningfully with customers.

Great to have

• Direct involvement in prior SAP HANA hardware, HCI, or cloud certification submissions.
• Experience with SAP HANA System Replication, scale-out landscapes, and HA/DR validation under fault injection.
• Familiarity with SAP application-layer benchmarking (SD benchmark, BW/4HANA or S/4HANA workload profiles) in addition to infrastructure KPIs.
• Nutanix certification (NCP/NCM) or SAP HANA Technology certification.