Principal SAP Finance & Data

Helsing's finance systems are scaling fast, and this role exists to ensure they scale with rigour. As Principal SAP Finance & Data, you will own SAP S/4HANA end-to-end: understanding its configuration, identifying where technical debt lives, and resolving it. Your immediate focus will be a thorough audit of the current SAP landscape, the elimination of manual workarounds, and a material acceleration of the month-end close cycle. Over time, you will set the standard for how Finance Transformation uses data and automation across Helsing, managing the Finance Data Engineer and translating technical complexity into plain financial language for all stakeholders. This role carries a clear trajectory toward SAP Solution Architect and Process Owner.

The day-to-day

• Own and execute the SAP S/4HANA improvement roadmap, including configuration, module ownership across FI, CO, TR and MM, release planning, and the elimination of accumulated technical debt
• Configure, test, and approve SAP changes directly, ensuring hands-on accountability rather than vendor dependency for standard tasks, and partner with the Finance Data Engineer to design the data architecture connecting SAP to Abacum and Citi
• Govern the Finance Data Lake including data modelling, lineage, access controls, and quality SLAs, and manage vendor relationships with SAP, Abacum, and Citi
• Design self-healing finance pipelines with automated anomaly detection, root-cause classification, and auto-remediation, and apply process-mining tools such as Celonis to map SAP transaction flows and identify optimisation opportunities
• Represent Finance Technology in external audits, and communicate technical constraints clearly to Finance Operations, Engineering, Treasury, HR, and Legal

• Have built and owned SAP S/4HANA in practice, with deep configuration knowledge of FI and CO and working familiarity with TR and MM, and can operate independently of a vendor team for standard tasks
• Are fluent in SQL and data modelling, and comfortable writing and reviewing Python scripts for data transformation and pipeline validation
• Understand financial reporting to a substantive level, including IFRS, multi-entity consolidation, and intercompany eliminations, and can engage credibly with finance stakeholders
• Have integrated banking platforms via API, with familiarity with treasury data flows and formats such as MT940
• Have delivered finance technology programmes in regulated or government-contract environments, such as defence, aerospace, or deep-tech, and communicate fluently in both business-level German and English

Note: We operate in an industry where women, as well as other minority groups, are systematically under-represented. We encourage you to apply even if you don't meet all the listed qualifications; ability and impact cannot be summarised in a few bullet points.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with agent-first automation approaches and experience evaluating AI agent alternatives before designing manual process steps
• Background contributing to external audit processes in a finance technology capacity

• Competitive salary and VSOP options
• Relocation support: up to €2,500 and 4 weeks temporary accommodation
• Learning: €500/£450 yearly allowance
• Health & wellness: gym membership and mental health support (Nilo.health)
• Social: regularly company events and monthly social allowances
• Enhanced parental leave: 22 weeks fully paid for primary caregivers & 6 weeks for secondary caregivers.
• Family support: 5 days of paid family emergency leave, 100% remote work option during pregnancy and phased return to work

Helsing is a defence AI company. Our mission is to protect our democracies. We aim to achieve technological leadership, so that open societies can continue to make sovereign decisions and control their ethical standards. As democracies, we believe we have a special responsibility to be thoughtful about the development and deployment of powerful technologies like AI. We take this responsibility seriously. We are an ambitious and committed team of engineers, AI specialists and customer-facing programme managers. We are looking for mission-driven people to join our European teams - and apply their skills to solve the most complex and impactful problems. We embrace an open and transparent culture that welcomes healthy debates on the use of technology in defence, its benefits, and its ethical implications., Join Helsing and work with world-leading experts in their fields * Helsing's work is important. You'll be directly contributing to the protection of democratic countries while balancing both ethical and geopolitical concerns * The work is unique. We operate in a domain that has highly unusual technical requirements and constraints, and where robustness, safety, and ethical considerations are vital. You will face unique Engineering and AI challenges that make a meaningful impact in the world * Our work frequently takes us right up to the state of the art in technical innovation, be it reinforcement learning, distributed systems, generative AI, or deployment infrastructure. The defence industry is entering the most exciting phase of the technological development curve. Advances in our field of world are not incremental: Helsing is part of, and often leading, historic leaps forward * In our domain, success is a matter of order-of-magnitude improvements and novel capabilities. This means we take bets, aim high, and focus on big opportunities. Despite being a relatively young company, Helsing has already been selected for multiple significant government contracts * We actively encourage healthy, proactive, and diverse debate internally about what we do and how we choose to do it. Teams and individual engineers are trusted (and encouraged) to practise responsible autonomy and critical thinking, and to focus on outcomes, not conformity. At Helsing you will have a say in how we (and you!) work, the opportunity to engage on what does and doesn't work, and to take ownership of aspects of our culture that you care deeply about