PhD Research Associate (Industry PhD Program) - Artificial Intelligence, SA

at  SAP

WE HELP THE WORLD RUN BETTER

At SAP, we enable you to bring out your best. Our company culture is focused on collaboration and a shared passion to help the world run better. How? We focus every day on building the foundation for tomorrow and creating a workplace that embraces differences, values flexibility, and is aligned to our purpose-driven and future-focused work. We offer a highly collaborative, caring team environment with a strong focus on learning and development, recognition for your individual contributions, and a variety of benefit options for you to choose from.
SAP will be prioritizing candidates with full working rights in Singapore.

ROLE

As a PhD Research Associate, under the Industry PhD program (IPP), you will be at the forefront of innovation in Business AI. You will work fulltime at the SAP Business AI unit while pursuing your PhD degree at the National University of Singapore (NUS). You will conduct cutting-edge research in generative AI and machine learning and publish your findings in top academic conferences and journals aligned to internal guidelines. Possible PhD topics, informed by real industry problems, include AI agents based on large language models (LLMs) and vision models, robust LLM-based evaluation, resilient multimodal retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG), document AI, multimodal LLMs for tabular AI, and synthetic data for anomaly detection. Your research will be supervised by a mentor at SAP and an academic supervisor at the university.
While your focus will be on research and completing your PhD, you will be able to gain industry exposure through working on projects with our data scientists and developers to embed the latest advancements in AI/ML into our software products. This unique opportunity combines academic pursuit with practical experience, allowing you to gain valuable insights into the real-world impact of your research. Successful candidates need to be accepted into the PhD program by NUS.

EXPECTATIONS AND TASKS

Your tasks include:

• Push the frontiers of what is possible in AI in an SAP-defined research project
• Explore, understand, and implement recent research approaches and find ways to improve it
• Understand business processes and assess business relevance of AI solutions
• Create excellence both in terms of research results quality and system scalability
• Communicate the relevance of implemented systems and achieved results in a visual and consistent way
• Work closely with the data science and engineering teams to transfer research results into product code base
• Ability to work in global teams with different time zones
• Immerse yourself quickly into new topics, terminology, and development tasks
• Complete all academic requirements and your PhD degree on time