About this role
Description
The Amazon Scholar team is seeking a Senior Program Manager to support the Amazon Scholar Program. This global, high-impact role supports a program that enables university professors to work on Amazon's most significant scientific and technical challenges without leaving their academic institutions through part-time or limited-term engagements.
The Senior Program Manager is responsible for facilitating key milestones across the Scholar employee lifecycle and for defining and delivering mechanisms and solutions that resolve complex problems, create lasting value and drive broad cross-organizational and cross-regional business impact.
This role supports a global program end-to-end — defining and executing development goals, consulting business and science leaders, developing a communication strategy, and managing all associated workflows. The Senior Program Manager builds internal mechanisms to automate and scale workflows globally and develops sustainable, long-term strategies for academic engagement.
Key job responsibilities
- **Process re-engineering and gap identification:** Identifies gaps and opportunities across regions, processes, and organizations (e.g., workflows, tooling, operating procedures). Serves as the single-threaded owner for a specialty employee model with non-standard lifecycle policies, part-time/limited-term engagement structures, and a unique compensation model. Owns a portfolio of critical workstreams to re-engineer processes, redefine ownership, and drive efficiency requiring cross-functional influence across central People eXperience and Technology (PXT) teams.
- **Mechanism design and adoption:** Creates, optimizes, and drives adoption of the mechanisms that ensure long-term program success. Builds novel mechanisms and artifacts to sustain the Scholar population, force-multiplying through stakeholders and partners while addressing unique use cases.
- **Autonomous leadership in ambiguous domains:** Operates with significant independence in areas where strategy has not yet been defined. Navigates high complexity and ambiguity with customers, stakeholders, and decision-makers that often include Amazon's most senior leadership. The Scholar Program team serves as an overlay across all core PXT functions — requiring strong judgment, backbone, and autonomy to prioritize roadmaps, invest resources, and deliver results.
- **Data-driven business operations:** Supports Business Operations for Scholars Programs, designing reporting to inspect key org goals, KPIs, and insights through MBRs and QBRs. Defines product requirements for dashboards and influences data availability and decision-making in partner teams — for example, working with Finance to enable mechanisms that track Scholar program spend as an input to business planning and ROI evaluation.
About the team
We are a team of strategic recruiters and program managers working to bring the best executive-level academic science talent to Amazon and elevate our reputation in the academic science community as an employer of choice. We believe Amazon is a unique place to measure the impact of new scientific ideas, given our scale and ownership of both an information infrastructure and a physical infrastructure. The Scholars Programs team focuses on three priorities:
1. Creating simple pathways to hire, develop, and retain world-class academic talent.
2. Developing internal and academic partnerships globally to address customer problems and demands.
3. Driving a non-conventional program to facilitate long-term science talent acquisition and retention in specialized domains.
Basic Qualifications
- 5+ years of program or project management experience
- Experience using data and metrics to determine and drive improvements
- Experience owning program strategy, end to end delivery, and communicating results to senior leadership
- 5+ years of working cross functionally with tech and non-tech teams experience
Preferred Qualifications
- 2+ years of driving process improvements experience
- Knowledge of general AI tools
- Master's degree, or MBA in business, operations, human resources, adult education, organizational development, instructional design or related field
- Experience building scalable programs and repeatable scalable processes, levering various tools and methods to create scale and efficiency
- Track record of building and scaling complex initiatives within fast-paced technology industry
- Experience with academic institutions or research organizations
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits .
USA, NY, New York - 127,200.00 - 185,000.00 USD annually
USA, WA, Seattle - 115,600.00 - 160,000.00 USD annually