Senior SAP HANA Database Performance Engineer

Summary

Join the team that serves as Apple's nerve center, our Information Systems and Technology group. From Apple Pay to the Apple website to our data centers around the globe, you'll help design and run the substantial systems that countless employees and customers rely on every day.

The SAP Quality Engineering team safeguards the performance health of Apple's SAP production systems. Our S/4HANA landscape operates at a scale few enterprises experience. We are building a performance engineering presence in Shanghai, and we are looking for someone who works at the database layer: reading plans, reading system views, and knowing why HANA is doing what it is doing.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will analyze real production workloads, diagnose database performance problems end to end, and drive root cause from symptom to a measured fix. You work across the full database performance surface — SQL and execution plans, column-store behavior, locks, memory, and persistence — and you back every finding with evidence from system views and traces rather than assumption. You will set the database performance bar for the Shanghai team and hold changes to it before they reach production.

Description

Own HANA database performance for the systems in scope: SQL tuning, execution plan analysis, and remediation of expensive statements in production.
Diagnose database internals — column store behavior, delta merge, partitioning, compression, join engine versus calculation engine execution, plan cache behavior, and statement routing.
Own scale-out behavior where applicable: table placement and distribution, table redistribution, client-side and statement routing, and the cost of cross-node joins and internode network traffic.
Analyze resource behavior under load: memory allocation and growth, CPU and thread contention, NUMA effects, savepoint and persistence behavior, storage latency and throughput.
Own workload and capacity management: workload classes and admission control, concurrency limits, growth and sizing forecasts, and the evidence behind them.
Lead the database-side diagnosis of production performance incidents. Drive root cause analysis from symptom through system views and plan analysis to a measured fix, and write it up.
Design and validate HA/DR behavior, including HANA System Replication, failover and takeover testing, and the performance characteristics of the replication path.
Review database-facing changes before they ship: CDS views, AMDP procedures, ABAP SQL, indexing and partitioning changes, and data volume and archiving strategy. Own the database performance perspective in architecture and design reviews.
Own database housekeeping that drives performance: delta merge and mergedog tuning, savepoint cadence, version garbage collection, statistics refresh, and column-store load and unload behavior.
Build repeatable measurement: baselines, regression detection on expensive statements, and automated collection of plan and resource evidence so problems are caught before customers see them.
Partner with the BTP performance engineer, ABAP developers, Basis, and functional teams to separate database causes from application causes and to land fixes in the right layer.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years in database or performance engineering, with demonstrated ownership of SAP HANA performance in production.
• Deep hands-on SAP HANA expertise: column store internals, delta merge, partitioning, compression, memory management, and the execution model.
• Proven SQL tuning skill with evidence. You can walk through a plan you changed, the measurement that justified it, and the before and after result in CPU, elapsed time, and records processed.
• Practical command of the diagnostic toolset: PlanViz, expensive statements trace, SQL plan cache, HANA system monitoring views, thread and memory views, ST05, SAT and STAD.
• Experience separating database causes from application, network, and infrastructure causes, and defending that separation with data.
• Linux and infrastructure diagnosis at the database layer: CPU, memory, NUMA, I/O and storage latency, network throughput.
• Experience with HANA high availability and disaster recovery, including System Replication and failover testing.
• Experience owning 24x7 production database incidents, including on-call and written root cause analysis.
• Scripting ability in Python, shell, or an equivalent language for automating measurement and analysis.
• Professional working proficiency in English and Mandarin.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Qualifications

• S/4HANA performance experience: CDS view and AMDP tuning, code pushdown patterns, and custom code remediation.
• Experience running HANA on Alibaba Cloud, including instance sizing, storage and network characteristics, and cross-zone HA patterns.
• Experience with HANA Cloud in addition to HANA 2.0 on-premise.
• Oracle performance tuning experience, or experience with an ECC to S/4HANA migration and comparative baselining.
• Data volume management, archiving, and near-line storage experience at large scale.
• Experience applying AI and ML tooling to database performance analysis and regression detection.
• SAP HANA certification, and working knowledge of Agile or Scrum delivery.