Manager, Safety Design Engineering, Workplace Health & Safety

Step into a pivotal leadership role within the Workplace Health and Safety (WHS) organization as the Manager, Safety Design Engineering. What sets this role apart is its direct influence on how Amazon designs safe systems at a global scale. You won’t just manage a team—you’ll shape the technical direction for eliminating hazards from Amazon’s buildings, equipment, automation, and high-energy systems.

You will lead engineers who define how safety is engineered into new technologies and facility designs, guide partners through safety-critical decisions, and represent WHS in early architectural reviews and major capital programs. You’ll influence long-range planning, network design strategy, and vendor engagements, ensuring safety is established as a core engineering requirement. The team owns the safety-related elements of Amazon’s designs, embedding hazard-elimination and risk-reduction principles into engineering decisions.

What makes this role unique is the range of challenges you’ll solve cross-organizational technical conflicts, addressing ambiguous engineering problems, and shaping the safety architecture for emerging automation and high-energy systems. This is a high-leverage position where a single decision can impact safety outcomes across Amazon's global operations network.

Key job responsibilities
Lead, manage, and develop a team that owns WHS design standards and the safety-related elements of Amazon’s system design across Prevention-through-Design (PtD), engineering calculations, simulation requirements, Material Handling Equipment (MHE) envelopes, ergonomics, machine safety, noise-vibration-harshness (NVH), maintenance access, and high-hazard energy systems. Apply Safety first-principles engineering, analytical modeling, and quantitative risk methods to validate system assumptions and establish safe design envelopes for buildings, automation, MHE, and high-energy systems.

Develop mechanisms that translate complex facility, automation, and MHE designs into clear safety requirements and repeatable processes that ensure consistent design quality across programs, regions, and business units. Lead cross-disciplinary engineering alignment across mechanical, electrical, controls, and systems engineering to embed safety requirements into upstream design decisions.

Create and maintain technical mechanisms—standards, analytical models, specifications, templates, and calculators—that embed PtD from concept development through commissioning. Resolve ambiguous, safety-critical engineering challenges, including certification-path conflicts, racking and MHE geometry issues, and determinations of system-level safety margins. Serve as the technical decision owner for Requests for Proposals (RFPs), vendor evaluations, engineered safety controls, and design reviews for automation, MHE, facility layouts, and high-energy systems.

A day in the life
This role’s primary focus is making sure Amazon designs safe systems. You’ll lead a team of engineers who set safety standards, build mechanisms, and guide early design decisions for buildings, automation, MHE, and high-energy systems. Day to day, you’ll partner with Amazon's Engineering and Operations teams to review concepts, resolve design conflicts, validate assumptions, and decide whether proposals meet safety requirements. You’ll improve standards, templates, and calculators, and tackle ambiguous engineering problems with no precedent. At times, you’ll step into escalations or pilot deployments where decisions have network-wide impact.

About the team
Our mission is clear: embed safety into Amazon’s operations from day zero. This team ensures every building, automation platform, and MHE system begins with Prevention-through-Design and hazard elimination as core engineering requirements. Our vision is a global network where safety, performance, and innovation advance together. As part of this team, you will define the standards, models, and mechanisms that guide upstream system design across Amazon. You will work directly with Amazon's talented Engineering and Operations teams to solve complex design challenges and shape how new technologies are introduced safely, reliably, and at scale.