Principal Program Manager, Business Operations, Workforce Staffing

Principal Program Manager, Business Operations

Workforce Staffing (WFS) is Amazon's high-volume hiring engine, responsible for attracting, hiring, and onboarding hundreds of thousands of associates annually across global operations. WFS partners with Operations, PXT, Finance, and Technology teams to deliver a world-class candidate and associate experience while continuously driving down cost-per-hire and time-to-fill through process innovation, operational rigor, and data-driven decision-making.

The Principal Program Manager, Business Operations will serve as the single-threaded operational leader across business operations, process engineering, knowledge management, and financial management for WFS. This role reports to the Transformation leader and influences a team of program managers, tech teams, science partners and process engineers who collectively ensure WFS runs with discipline, scales with consistency, and improves continuously across a distributed global workforce.

The optimal candidate is a seasoned operational leader who thrives in ambiguity, can shift between strategic planning and tactical execution in the same day, and brings a track record of building mechanisms that outlast any single individual. They should be equally comfortable presenting a quarterly business review to VP-level leadership as they are diving deep into a broken SOP or a budget variance. This leader must balance frugality with creativity, approach problem-solving with an emphasis on root cause over symptom, and demonstrate a bias for action while managing calculated risk in a fast-paced, high-volume environment.

Key Job Responsibilities

• Establish and own the end-to-end WFS business rhythm — incorporating finance cycles, corporate planning milestones, and cross-functional dependencies into a unified operational cadence
• Own the preparation, facilitation, and follow-through for WBR, MBR, QBR, and MPR business reviews — surfacing hiring funnel defects, financial variances, and performance against key initiatives with clear owners and ECDs
• Lead process engineering efforts across WFS's end-to-end hiring workflows (candidate attraction through Day 1), identifying bottlenecks, designing scalable improvements, and partnering with technology teams to automate manual steps
• Own WFS knowledge management — ensuring operational playbooks, SOPs, runbooks, and best practices are documented, current, version-controlled, and accessible across all regions and teams
• Manage WFS financial operations including budget planning, forecasting, variance analysis, cost allocation across programs, and T&E and controllable line items within budget
• Steward the annual planning process (OP1/OP2), forums, and goal-setting mechanisms for WFS business operations
• Represent WFS with cross-functional partner groups (Operations, PXT, Finance, Tech) to drive business initiatives, ensure WFS perspective is represented, and ensure dependencies and asks are communicated clearly
• Lead cross-team projects to ensure regional and global alignment on key strategic WFS initiatives, convening and managing distributed teams to drive execution
• Develop, coach, and retain a high-performing team across business operations, process engineering, knowledge management, and finance — setting clear priorities across competing demands and building bench strength