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Principal Program Manager, WHS Strategy, Workplace Health and Safety

Amazon.com Inc

  • Arlington, VA
  • 7 days ago

    Highlights

    Specific accountabilities include: Collecting, synthesizing, and integrating strategic inputs from WHS teams across the organization, then drafting that content into a single, unified voice that reflects the WHS leader"s perspective, ensuring consistent messaging, tone, and narrative alignment from document to document. The leader in this position will serve as the primary owner of WHS"s strategic planning cycle and will be accountable for the quality, coherence, and timeliness of the safety narrative presented to Amazon"s most senior executives, including VP, SVP, and Board-level audiences.

    Numbers & Facts

    LocationArlington, VA
    IndustryRetail
    Company Size10,000 employees or more
    Year Founded1994
    Websitehttp://Amazon.com/militaryroles

    Description

    Amazon"s Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) organization is responsible for safeguarding the health and wellbeing of more than 1.2 million operations employees across Amazon"s global operations network. WHS advances safety performance through three pillars: people, programs, and technology. The organization builds a self-sustaining safety culture, prevents incidents through engineering and standardized operational practices, and applies artificial intelligence and computer vision to drive faster, proactive safety interventions at scale.

    We are seeking a Principal Program Manager to lead the WHS Strategy team. This is a high-visibility leadership role at the intersection of enterprise strategy, executive communications, and operational safety performance. The leader in this position will serve as the primary owner of WHS"s strategic planning cycle and will be accountable for the quality, coherence, and timeliness of the safety narrative presented to Amazon"s most senior executives, including VP, SVP, and Board-level audiences.

    This role requires a strategic leader who is effective under pressure, comfortable navigating organizational complexity, and capable of exercising sound judgment on matters with broad impact. The right candidate brings deep experience partnering directly with executive leadership, the ability to bring structure to ambiguous problems, and a consistent track record of delivering on high-stakes commitments. A core requirement is the ability to take complex, technical safety programs and communicate them with clarity and simplicity to audiences ranging from front-line operators to Board members. Exceptional written and verbal communication skills are not a differentiator for this role; they are a baseline requirement.

    Key job responsibilities

    This leader will own the end-to-end strategic planning lifecycle for WHS, including the development of 1 to 3 year strategic roadmaps, annual operating plans (OP1/OP2), and recurring executive reviews at monthly, quarterly, and annual cadences. Specific accountabilities include:

    Collecting, synthesizing, and integrating strategic inputs from WHS teams across the organization, then drafting that content into a single, unified voice that reflects the WHS leader"s perspective, ensuring consistent messaging, tone, and narrative alignment from document to document.

    Authoring and managing the portfolio of WHS executive-level documents, ensuring analytical rigor, narrative precision, and strategic alignment across every deliverable that represents WHS to senior leadership.

    Partnering with operations, engineering, and technology organizations across Amazon to integrate health and safety priorities into their strategic plans, influencing outcomes without direct authority.

    Designing and governing the mechanisms through which safety data is reported to leadership, including ownership of data lock processes that ensure consistency and accuracy across all executive-facing materials.

    Identifying opportunities to modernize how safety performance data is visualized, shared, and consumed by decision-makers at every level, raising the standard for insight-driven reporting.

    Managing the enterprise planning calendar and orchestrating cross-functional inputs from a broad coalition of WHS field teams, central program teams, and operations stakeholders globally.

    Translating complex operational programs, technical initiatives, and nuanced safety concepts into clear, concise, and accessible content for executive and non-specialist audiences.

    A day in the life

    You are a results-oriented leader with a genuine intellectual curiosity about what drives safety performance in complex operational environments. You combine strategic thinking with operational discipline: you can frame a multi-year vision and then build the mechanisms to bring it to life. You are comfortable being the person in the room who is expected to have the answer, and you hold yourself to that standard.

    You bring a data-driven approach to every decision, an instinct for continuous improvement, and the organizational fluency to move work forward across teams that do not report to you. You are energized by ambiguity, not paralyzed by it. You communicate with clarity and economy, recognizing that at the executive level, every word carries weight. You are ready to own the strategic direction of safety for one of the world"s largest employers and to ensure that direction is understood, aligned, and acted upon from the front line to the boardroom.

    This is an in-office role requiring five days per week on-site. Travel is expected at 10 to 20 percent annually.

    About the team

    The WHS Strategy team functions as the connective tissue between WHS"s technical and operational organizations and Amazon"s executive leadership. The team builds and manages the mechanisms through which WHS compiles, creates, and refines the strategic planning and reporting documents that represent safety performance at the highest levels of the company. This is the program management group that owns the majority of WHS executive-level content and serves as the central authority for safety data and narrative consistency across Amazon.

    The team operates as a trusted, high-credibility point of contact for a large global network of senior and executive stakeholders. The work is inherently cross-functional, requiring the ability to synthesize competing inputs, reconcile inconsistencies in data or direction, and produce a unified strategic view under tight timelines. The team"s output directly shapes how Amazon"s senior leaders understand and act on safety.

    About Company

    At Amazon, we don’t wait for the next big idea to present itself. We envision the shape of impossible things and then we boldly make them reality. So far, this mindset has helped us achieve some incredible things. Let’s build new systems, challenge the status quo, and design the world we want to live in. We believe the work you do here will be the best work of your life.

    Wherever you are in your career exploration, Amazon likely has an opportunity for you. Our research scientists and engineers shape the future of natural language understanding with Alexa. Fulfillment center associates around the globe send customer orders from our warehouses to doorsteps. Product managers set feature requirements, strategy, and marketing messages for brand new customer experiences. And as we grow, we’ll add jobs that haven’t been invented yet.

    It’s Always Day 1
    At Amazon, it’s always “Day 1.” Now, what does this mean and why does it matter? It means that our approach remains the same as it was on Amazon’s very first day – to make smart, fast decisions, stay nimble, invent, and stay focused on delighting our customers. In our 2016 shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos shared his thoughts on how to keep up a Day 1 company mindset. “Staying in Day 1 requires you to experiment patiently, accept failures, plant seeds, protect saplings, and double down when you see customer delight,” he wrote. “A customer-obsessed culture best creates the conditions where all of that can happen.” You can read the full letter here

    Our Leadership Principles
    Our Leadership Principles help us keep a Day 1 mentality. They aren’t just a pretty inspirational wall hanging. Amazonians use them, every day, whether they’re discussing ideas for new projects, deciding on the best solution for a customer’s problem, or interviewing candidates. To read through our Leadership Principles from Customer Obsession to Bias for Action, visit https://www.amazon.jobs/principles

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