Job posts for this role ask most for ABAP, SAP's own programming language, with SAP S/4HANA and SAP HANA as the system, SAP Fiori and SAPUI5 for the screens, Core Data Services for the data, and IDoc and SAP BTP Integration Suite to connect SAP to other systems. On the business side, materials management and SAP EWM, the warehouse module, are the areas asked for most. The full story of what each skill is used for is on the skills page.

The services world holds almost all SAP work, and here the work is implementing SAP for clients, often moving them from older SAP systems to S/4HANA. Accenture is by far the largest employer of SAP engineers in India, and SAP is its largest single role. It hires across every SAP area, with ABAP and Fiori the commonest technical work and materials management the commonest business area, mostly at the mid level. For someone with a few years of SAP, it has more openings than anywhere else in the market (who they hire).

Outside Accenture, the IT services giants, like IBM, TCS, Infosys and Capgemini, hire the most SAP engineers, and their work is more technical, mostly ABAP. The quiet foreign majors, like CGI, NTT DATA, T-Systems and Sopra Steria, move European clients to S/4HANA, mostly with senior engineers. The SAP specialists in the specialist firms built around one skill, like YASH Technologies, Bristlecone and Rimini Street, live on SAP work, and Rimini Street supports older SAP systems for clients who have not moved. The consulting firms' engineering arms, like EY, PwC India and Deloitte, pair functional consultants with S/4HANA and ABAP developers in large transformation programmes. EPAM, Birlasoft and Virtusa hire a few. More on all of them is in the services world's SAP hiring.

Among the GCCs, SAP engineers run the parent's own SAP system rather than a client's, and they are hired most by parents that make, move and sell physical goods. These roles are mostly for senior engineers.

Inside the manufacturers and carmakers, Cargill, Ecolab, Ford and Trelleborg hire SAP engineers more heavily than any other GCC group, and they are among the GCCs most open to a junior. Inside the retailers and consumer-goods companies, Walmart posts more SAP openings than any other centre, and Mondelēz, H&M and Columbia Sportswear run their own SAP systems from India. Inside the logistics operators and distributors, Cardinal Health, Ingram Micro, Maersk and DHL hire for S/4HANA and materials management. Inside the energy and oil majors, SLB and Shell are small but hire for ABAP and materials management. Merck and Bristol Myers Squibb hire a few for S/4HANA. The banks hardly hire SAP engineers, because banks do not run on SAP. More on SAP across the GCCs is in the GCCs' SAP hiring.

Product companies almost never hire SAP engineers, because they build their own software rather than run a company on SAP. The few exceptions run factories or sell tools that sit on top of SAP. Electrolux, Signify and BSH, which make smart home appliances and consumer electronics, run their appliance factories on SAP. Celonis, Redwood Software and OpenText, part of ERP and business automation, build software that works on top of SAP, such as process mining and job scheduling. Caterpillar and Rockwell Automation hire a few for their manufacturing.

Big tech hardly hires SAP engineers at all.

The staffing companies, like TekWissen, Wissen Infotech, Umanist and Megan Soft, place SAP engineers with clients, mostly for S/4HANA and materials management, and mostly at senior level. They are a common route to SAP contract work (who they hire). The hiring platforms offer very little SAP work.

SAP engineers are rarely hired by product companies, apart from a few manufacturers, or by big tech. The finance, commerce and health software companies hire almost none, and neither do the GCCs of banks. The hiring platforms offer very little.