Sr. Program Manager - Capital Planning, WWRGD

Description

Amazon's Worldwide Retail Grocery Development (WWRGD) team is seeking a highly skilled and strategic Sr. Program Manager to join our Capital Planning team. This role sits within the WWRGD Capital Planning team supporting Amazon's multi-banner grocery portfolio, partnering across Real Estate, Design, Pre-Construction, Construction, and Finance to ensure disciplined capital stewardship at scale.

You will own the end-to-end capital approval process for WWRGD's development portfolio – from annual OP budget planning through Capital Appropriation Request (CAR) creation, approval routing, quarterly guidance cycle updates, and post-launch cost stewardship. You will be the connective tissue between senior leadership, real estate, design, development execution teams, and cross-functional stakeholders, ensuring capital is approved efficiently and with the strategic context leadership needs to make informed decisions as we scale Amazon's grocery network.

The successful candidate will manage large annual capital budgets across multiple banners, utilizing advanced tools, automation, AI, and data analysis to enhance capital planning accuracy and visibility.

Key job responsibilities

OP Budget Planning & Guidance Cycles:

• Lead OP1/OP2 and quarterly guidance cycles end-to-end, including timelines, stakeholder coordination, and estimation methodology.

• Provide analyses and coordinate with key stakeholders on averages, variance bridging, and cost drivers.

• Develop written OP/Guidance narrative documents for leadership review, providing strategic context alongside the numbers.

• Facilitate alignment between business and finance leaders to secure agreement on costs, project lists, and investment priorities.

Capital Appropriation Requests (CARs):

• Own and manage the full CAR process end-to-end for Real Estate, Land, Pre-Construction, Construction, Startup, and Lease funding requests.

• Maintain and continuously improve CAR Funding Templates and standardized white paper formats.

• Engage cross-functional POCs (Real Estate, Pre-Construction, Construction, Finance) and assemble comprehensive CAR packages.

• Present construction, startup, and lease costs prior to lease signatures for approval.

• Lead CAR scheduling, document reviews, leadership presentations, and action item follow-ups.

• Route CARs through Amazon Approvals and manage the full approval lifecycle.

Cost Stewardship & Tracking:

• Maintain a macro-level schedule lookahead across the portfolio to inform planning cycles and resource allocation.

• Monitor portfolio-wide cost posture from OP through CAR, ensuring alignment between planned and actual spend.

• Conduct monthly Post-launch Cap Ex Reviews with quarterly deep-dives to analyze approved vs. actual spending.

• Identify and elevate cost outliers or trends requiring leadership attention.

• Own the capital reporting section of W /M /Q  cadences, presenting approval metrics, portfolio health, and variance narratives to leadership.

• Establish and support capital accounts under grocery business units, improving speed to capital access.

• Lead initiatives to provide clarity into project spend, ensuring achievable paths to cost reduction measures in our builds or projects.

Tools & Continuous Improvement:

• Build repeatable processes to improve CAR creation efficiency, leveraging AI and automation tools (e.g., template generation, data extraction, cost modeling) to reduce manual effort.

• Drive standardization across banners and business units to enable consistent processes and shared best practices.

• Utilize or create automated cost management tools and data analysis to improve capital budgeting accuracy year over year.

• Continuously seek ways to enhance cost forecasting accuracy and process efficiency.

A day in the life

Mornings start with normal catchup work/follow ups needed from your inbox/slack. These request can range from spending to process and come from all business partners for past/current/future projects. Meetings consist of alignment calls - providing financial workback requirements for CAR's and driving the team towards a plan to execute the capital plan. Time will be spent drafting CARs and related follow ups - responding/inputting information into documents for financials and creating leadership narratives around project cost.

About the team

Within the team there will be 2-3 peers that are doing similar work but for different scopes/programs within the organization. This provides a solid peer group to help troubleshoot and support each other throughout the project life cycles. Our culture is one of supporting our execution teams success with our financial acumen.

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

Preferred Qualifications

• 2+ years of driving process improvements experience

• Master's degree, or MBA in business, operations, human resources, adult education,…