As a world-leading enterprise software development company, SAP aims to help every customer become a best-run business by providing software solutions from in-memory databases to cloud analytics and services for various business challenges. Currently, the Vancouver site is the most important location driving the new SAP Cloud for Analytics (C4A), which aims to bring all analytics capabilities into one high-performing, real-time solution. It enables organizations to use this single solution to track performance, analyze trends, predict and collaborate in order to make informed decisions and improve business outcomes.

My Work at SAP

I started my co-op at SAP with the Lumira project in the first four months and moved to the Dev Ops team of C4A for the rest of my twelve-month term. The Dev Ops team strives for maintaining and continuously improving the path from every single line of code to the end-user value. They construct the delivery pipeline and infrastructure at the stage of build automation and continuous integration, test automation and deployment automation, monitoring and scaling between SaaS and PaaS. The goal is to establish a fast agile feedback loop and achieve reliable delivery of change or new features to users continuously. The team also addresses the challenges in cloud architecture and operation to provide highly scalable and available services to customers.

A valuable aspect of my work experience was the significant exposure to the automating continuous integration and delivery pipeline. After a one-year co-op, I have gained substantial knowledge and hands-on experience with development infrastructure tools such as Maven, Jenkins, Git/Gerrit etc. Thanks to my mentor and manager’s support, I had opportunities to work on some very important and challenging tasks such as revamping the build script in collaboration with senior teammates, from whom I learned a lot. I also enjoyed the diversity of projects to work on as each required a lot of creativity to figure out solutions and exposed me to very different problems and issues. Even though sometimes jumping between several projects frequently can be hard, the learning experience is quite satisfying.

Work Environment

During my time at SAP, I noticed that changes and transitions can be quite fast, which requires everyone to keep active and always think ahead. Because of this, we have an All-hands meeting and Sea-to-sky sessions every two or three weeks so that everyone can sync up on our project progress, achievement, strategy and future plans. There is also a social lunch or dinner every month to encourage people across different teams to communicate and share information while enjoying food together.

Co-op students at SAP are a part of quite an active community, as there are lots of activities every week including lunch buddy, game night and career development sessions. SAP is very supportive of co-op students and embraces collaborative, innovative and experimental efforts. This environment has enabled me to improve my technical skills as well as my soft skills (such as communication and decision-making) a lot. I have really enjoyed my work at SAP Vancouver and appreciate all my co-workers for being willing to help and to share their knowledge and experience with me.