Bristlecone - Technical Service Manager - SAP Basis

Description: JOB DESCRIPTION Technical Service Manager (TSM)

Function: SAP Enterprise Cloud Services Customer Facing Unit (CFU)

Experience: 8 -12 years

Role Type: Customer-facing Technical Lead for RISE with SAP PCE

Role Purpose:

The Technical Service Manager (TSM) is the primary technical owner for customers consuming RISE with SAP.

The TSM ensures technical stability, oversees SAP operations, governs upgrades and changes, manages escalations, and aligns internal SAP teams and hyperscaler resources to meet customer SLAs.

This is a high-accountability, customer-facing, technically deep role.

Key Responsibilities Detailed:

Technical Ownership & Governance:

- Act as the technical single point of contact (SPOC) for assigned customer landscapes.

- Drive end-to-end responsibility for SAP system performance, stability, availability, and compliance.

- Conduct Technical Health Checks, configuration reviews, performance assessments, and stability audits.

- Own architecture validation for new environments, provisioning, and onboarding technical readiness.

Upgrade, Release & Evergreen Management:

- Plan and coordinate Quarterly Upgrades for RISE with SAP landscapes.

- Analyze upgrade impacts, validate pre-checks, remediation readiness, and customer-specific risks.

- Work with SAP Factory teams, Product Engineering, Security, and Infra teams for smooth deployment.

- Ensure compliance with Evergreen upgrade cycles, mandatory patches, and HANA revisions.

Transport, Change & Release Management:

- Own transport strategy: CTS+, TMS, gCTS, and cTMS integrations.

- Validate import sequencing, retrofit handling, dual/parallel landscapes, and freeze windows.

- Govern the customers change calendar, risk assessments, and downtime scheduling.

- Approve or reject high-risk changes based on technical judgement.

Incident, Escalation & War Room Management:

- Lead war rooms for P1/P2 incidents; drive resolution across global teams.

- Provide deep technical troubleshooting steering (BASIS, DB, OS, Cloud, Network).

- Deliver RCA, PIR, and stability improvement recommendations.

- Manage customer escalations diplomatically and maintain executive-level communication.

Performance, Availability & Capacity Management:

- Monitor system KPIs, HANA memory/CPU trends, DB growth, background job performance, and interface stability.

- Proactively identify performance degradation and provide predictive advisories.

- Recommend capacity upgrades, HA/DR improvements, and network optimizations.

Integration & Connectivity Oversight:

- Validate and troubleshoot Cloud Connector setup, CPI flows, API integrations, and interface failovers.

- Ensure connectivity readiness across hybrid landscapes (on-prem, cloud, SaaS).

- Ensure certificates, SSO integrations, and identity services (IAS/IPS) remain stable and compliant.

Technical Skills Requirements:

- Deep SAP BASIS (installations, configurations, upgrades, transport mgmt.)

- Strong HANA experience: performance tuning, column store analysis, memory leak detection, SQL troubleshooting.

- Working knowledge of cloud infra (Azure/AWS/GCP):

- VPC, Subnets, Routing, Firewalls.

- Load balancers, Security Groups, resiliency zones.

- VM sizing and OS-level analysis.

- Understanding of BTP & integration services.

- Skilled with Solution Manager, SAP Cloud ALM, SNOW, HANA Cockpit.

Soft Skills & Leadership Requirements:

- Exceptional communication (technical business translation).

- Ability to lead with authority during critical outages.

- High customer empathy with refusal capability when needed.

- Structured reporting: QBR, stability reports, SLA dashboards.