Senior Manager, WHS Design & Startup, WHS Design, Construction & Startup

About the role

The Senior Manager, WHS Design, Construction and Start Up partners with Site Operations and New Site Project teams to manage Workplace, Health and Safety deliverables when opening new facilities. They execute the new WHS Launch Start-Up plan to ensure sites implement all company WHS policies and programs and comply with applicable local, regional and federal regulations. This role builds high safety standards into new systems and processes across Amazon facilities and supervises a team of safety engineers supporting all businesses. The position functionally partners with engineering teams to coordinate end-to-end lifecycle management of safety in design.

Responsibilities

• Manage and monitor the WHS start-up plan for all new facilities.
• Analyze trends and design improvements to develop action plans for senior leadership.
• Advise senior leaders on emerging internal and external trends (e.g., lead and lag indicators, legislation, industry) and potential impact on roadmaps and strategy.
• Maintain organizational safety engineering risk assessment methodology including risk tolerances and make recommendations to senior management.
• Support new launches by performing risk assessments and identifying gaps/opportunities in regions, processes, and organizations (e.g., workflows, risk assessments, controls).
• Develop solutions that meet Amazon standards for safety, risk reduction, customer satisfaction, efficiency, scalability, simplicity, and operational excellence.
• Validate vendor technical safety solutions and partner with internal engineering and reliability maintenance teams to ensure legally compliant safety standards for equipment.
• Support business change by influencing change management processes within operations.
• Provide functional links with Engineering, Reliability and Maintenance Engineering, Procurement, New Build Safety and Real Estate teams.
• Generate regular technical updates for stakeholders and monthly reports on project status with clear analytical measures of status and risk.
• Serve as a WHS mentor and subject matter expert for launching sites, including site leadership and operations.
• Review processes and liaise with Engineering, Reliability and Maintenance Engineering, Procurement, and New Build/Real Estate teams to deliver machinery and system safety standards.
• Perform risk assessments on all equipment including Factory Acceptance Testing of new technologies.
• Provide guidance and design standards to ensure compliance with local/state/federal regulatory standards and Amazon Safety Policies and Procedures.
• Apply ergonomic principles in the review and design of equipment and processes.
• Review and interpret data to develop improvement plans within new processes and conduct safety reviews of new processes and equipment.
• Develop safety punch list items with business partners, detailing safety issues and recommendations for short- and long-term resolution.
• Perform design reviews with Worldwide Engineering and Ops Engineering in AutoCAD to design in safety features to buildings and processes.
• Travel to sites to perform risk assessments, Factory Acceptance Testing, Site Acceptance Testing, and validation of WHS DCS program managers’ commissioning of equipment, buildings, modules, and safety supplies.
• Communicate across stakeholders, analyze incident trends related to design, and design out risk to operations.
• Document and action post-launch lessons learned, design changes and improvements, and module updates.
• Collaborate with stakeholders to align design changes and improvements including risk assessments and risk reduction.

Requirements

• 10+ years of program or project management experience.
• 10+ years of cross-functional project delivery experience.
• 10+ years of experience working cross-functionally with technical and non-technical teams.
• 10+ years of team management experience.
• Experience defining program requirements and using data and metrics to determine improvements.
• Bachelor’s degree.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Safety, Engineering or Environmental preferred.
• Master’s degree preferred.
• Certified Safety Professional (CSP) preferred.
• Experience in Prevention through Design using elimination, mitigation and engineering control measures to reduce risk.
• 10+ years of experience driving end-to-end delivery, communicating results to senior leadership, and driving process improvements.
• Experience building processes, project management, and schedules; strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Demonstrated experience developing others into higher levels of responsibility.

Skills

• Excellent safety program and relevant safety, environmental and ergonomic knowledge.
• Detail-oriented with the ability to influence and demonstrate expertise when working with Operations and other Launch Business Partners.
• Ability to build trust and confidence with Engineering, New Site Project, Real Estate, Procurement and Operations teams.
• Effective communication delivering clear, concise and consistent messages verbally and in writing.
• Technical knowledge to engage with cross-functional teams and transform knowledge into compliant processes.
• Ability to read blueprints and interpret building template designs against regulatory, safety, policy and jurisdictional requirements.