Senior SAP 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. We are building a performance engineering presence in Shanghai to support SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) applications within Apple’s global SAP landscape. You will own how those applications behave under real load — end to end.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role. You will design realistic performance test scenarios, run experiments, read traces, and own production incidents. You bring broad, battle-tested experience optimizing applications hosted on cloud hyperscalers, and you apply that depth to the SAP BTP stack on various hyperscalers. Proven ability to design realistic, high-fidelity performance test scenarios — translating production behavior and business workflows into workload models, concurrency profiles, data volumes, and think-time distributions that exercise the system the way real load does. A test is only as good as the scenario behind it, and you build scenarios that surface mixed-load and endurance behavior rather than best-case single-user timings.

Description

Own end-to-end performance for SAP applications (on-premises and cloud): browser and client, API and integration layer, application runtime, and the network path to Apple’s global SAP systems.
Decompose latency across the full request path — DNS, TLS, proxy and gateway hops, payload size, round trips, downstream service time — and prove where the time is actually spent rather than where it is assumed to be.
Design realistic performance test scenarios and workload models — concurrency profiles, data volumes, and mixed-load and endurance patterns that exercise the system the way real load does. Run load, stress, soak, and capacity tests against BTP services, define pass/fail criteria with the business and architecture teams, and decide performance sign-offs.
Monitor and optimize event-driven and publish-subscribe flows on SAP Advanced Event Mesh and Kafka: throughput and broker sizing, topic/partition and consumer-group parallelism, consumer lag, delivery-guarantee cost, replay, and backpressure.
Tune the cloud substrate beneath BTP — compute right-sizing, autoscaling policies, storage IOPS and throughput, load balancing, and cross-zone/region network latency — treating the hyperscaler infrastructure as part of the request path, not a black box.
Build the observability needed to answer performance questions in production: metrics, traces, logs, and dashboards that work within Apple’s approved data-handling controls for China. Apply AI to build enhanced performance monitoring and reporting dashboards — anomaly and trend detection, automated root-cause surfacing, and narrative summaries that turn raw telemetry into decisions.
Own production incident response and post-go-live performance for your layer of the stack. Drive root cause analysis and close the loop with permanent fixes.
Partner with the HANA database performance engineer to separate application and runtime causes from database causes, and with development and functional teams to push fixes into the code.
Take part in architecture and design reviews, and own the performance perspective in those reviews before code is written.
Set performance engineering practice for the Shanghai team: test strategy, benchmarks, entry and exit criteria, and integration of performance tests into the delivery pipeline.

Minimum Qualifications

• 8+ years in software or performance engineering, with demonstrated ownership of performance for enterprise cloud applications in production.
• Experience with SAP BTP (Cloud Foundry or Kyma, CAP, Integration Suite, XSUAA/AppRouter) — or equivalent depth on another enterprise PaaS with a demonstrated ability to ramp quickly on BTP specifics.
• Proven end-to-end diagnosis across layers — you can describe a real latency or throughput problem you isolated, the telemetry you used, the root cause, and the measured result before and after.
• Experience with a load/performance testing tool (e.g., Apache JMeter, LoadRunner Enterprise, k6, or Gatling), including workload modelling and capacity analysis.
• Practical network and protocol knowledge: HTTP/2, TLS, connection pooling, timeouts, retries, DNS, and proxy behavior.
• Experience owning production incidents, including triage under time pressure and written root cause analysis.
• Professional working proficiency in English and Mandarin Chinese, given day-to-day partnership with Shanghai-based functional and business teams.

Preferred Qualifications

• Working knowledge of application performance monitoring and distributed tracing platforms, for example Dynatrace, AppDynamics, or Grafana.
• Experience with SAP BTP in China regions, and with the boundary between SAP-managed services and customer-operated infrastructure.
• Experience operating enterprise workloads on Alibaba Cloud, including networking, load balancing, and observability tooling.
• Experience with S/4HANA, OData, Fiori, and CDS-based application patterns.
• Knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes.
• Experience applying AI and ML tooling to performance testing and analysis workflows.
• Working knowledge of Agile or Scrum delivery.