Sr. Specialist, SAP Cloud Infrastructure Planning (Hybrid - NJ or PA)

Job Description

Our company's Information Technology (IT) division partners with colleagues across the business to help serve our patients and customers around the world. Ours is a high-energy team of dynamic, innovative individuals dedicated to leveraging information and technology to efficiently drive revenue and productivity, thereby advancing our company's contribution to global medical innovation.

Enterprise IT (EIT) is an essential component of the current IT division that provides support to the Pharmaceutical Research and Development (R&D), Supply Chain (Manufacturing), Marketing (Human Health) organizations as well as Enabling Functions. The EIT SAP Platform Team is responsible for our company's SAP Global Template asset, delivering enterprise-level capabilities through harmonized business processes and data.  The team is responsible for the operation of all our company's SAP and integrated solutions, governance of the associated enterprise assets, and cost-effective delivery of capabilities to support achievement of immediate and future state business objectives.

The SAP Cloud Infra Planning, Sr. Specialist will play a critical role in driving releases within our global environment and in leading the planning, coordination, and execution of global releases while also ensuring adherence to change management processes. The successful candidate should be familiar with processes and tools used to support, maintain, and change the SAP Platform. They must possess a deep understanding of SAP's platforms, products, and offering as well as have a strong technical background, exceptional project management skills, and the ability to work independently on high-profile tasks.

The SAP Cloud Infra Planning, Sr. Specialist is responsible for the following:

• Plan, schedule, and coordinate global releases, working closely with cross-functional teams and stakeholders to oversee build implementation for multiple environments ensuring that the solution being released is reliable and meets the necessary quality standards.

• Coordinate with basis, security, quality, value teams, and product owners to ensure smooth and successful release deployments.

• Utilize tools such as MS Office Suite, MS Project, MS Excel, Atlassian JIRA, and Atlassian Confluence for project planning, tracking, reporting and documentation.

• Effectively communicate complex issues and challenges to senior management in a summarized manner, both written and verbal.

• Apply understanding of Agile and Scrum methodologies, ensuring effective collaboration within cross-functional teams and iterative delivery.

• Plan and facilitate the application of annual support packs and infrastructure upgrades to SAP systems and patching during maintenance windows.

• Support all testing efforts (Unit, Integration, Acceptance, Volume, Performance, Regression) by the various solutioning teams as well as obtain stakeholders' sign-off for each release.

• Create release plans that encompass the release scope, timeline, and resources required for each release.

• Conduct Release Readiness reviews, Business Go/No-Go reviews, and Milestone Reviews to ensure the readiness of each release.

• Establish and enforce standardized release processes across EIT, optimizing deployment efficiency and reducing risks.

• Participate in Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings and other governance bodies to discuss release scope, roadblocks, and obtain necessary approvals (CAB is responsible for reviewing and approving changes to the IT environment)

Education:

• Bachelor's Degree required.

Required Skills:

• 5+ years of IT business solutions deployment experience.

• 1+ years working with cloud high-availability failover capabilities.

• 1+ years working with Zero downtime maintenance.

• SAP experience required – should have general understanding and basic knowledge of tool and functionality.

• Proficiency with project management tools – MS Project, Atlassian JIRA, SharePoint, or similar.

• Understanding of infrastructure components and technologies to facilitate working closely with infrastructure teams to develop and execute builds of environments within defined timelines.

• Experience with modern cloud concepts such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS and related solutions.

• In-depth knowledge of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), facilitating proper management of the end-to-end release and change processes.

• Understanding of Agile and Scrum methodologies as well as DevOps principles supporting continuous deployment practices, as it aligns with modern software development approaches

• Proven record of excellent