Service Business Operations Manager.

Operations Manager, Work Auth, Work Authorization
Amazon's Talent Solutions organization is working to build the earth's best employer — and Work Authorization (WA) is at the center of that mission. The WA team is a group of seasoned subject matter experts who, in close partnership with Legal, Risk & Compliance, Immigration, Technology, and Product teams, protects Amazon from the financial, reputational, and legal risks of unauthorized working across every country in which we operate. Our work is not incidental — it is a front-line defense against regulatory exposure and a foundational pillar of compliant, scalable global hiring.
As Manager III, HR Specialist for Work Authorization Operations, you will serve as a single-threaded owner for the operational delivery of work authorization compliance services worldwide. You will lead team managers and process leads who together oversee HR Specialists providing global production support.
This is a strategic L6 leadership role — you are expected to set vision and direction, define success, own the multi-year roadmap for your delivery organization, and represent WA Operations with authority in meetings with Legal, Risk & Compliance, Immigration, Technology, and Product stakeholders. You will build and sustain an organization that understands work authorization compliance at a deep, substantive level and that holds itself to an uncompromising standard of accuracy, process integrity, and SOP adherence.
You will work in close daily partnership with Regional HR Managers who own the program design and regional compliance strategy. Your accountability is for operational execution, team capability, and the delivery systems that make compliant, high-quality outcomes possible at scale. Together, you and the Regional HR Managers form the leadership backbone of Work Authorization.
People Management & Leadership Development
Define clear performance expectations for each Manager aligned to both business outcomes and leadership competencies; Build a succession pipeline within the management team; Model the standard you expect: deep curiosity, intellectual honesty, and zero tolerance for compliance shortcuts.
Own the org health of the broader team — including engagement, attrition, capacity planning, and workload equity — and develop mechanisms to proactively surface and address issues before they affect performance.
Partner with your Managers to navigate complex performance management situations, building their capability to have hard conversations and reach fair, documented outcomes.
Drive consistent onboarding and role-readiness standards across all team levels, ensuring new team members are equipped with substantive compliance knowledge — not just process scripts — before handling live casework.
Compliance Expertise & Knowledge Management
Develop genuine, deep fluency in work authorization law, regulatory frameworks, and compliance obligations across all operating jurisdictions — not surface-level familiarity. Understand the "why" behind every control, not just the "what."
Champion a compliance-first culture throughout your organization. Make it unambiguously clear that SOP deviations, unauthorized workarounds, and process shortcuts carry serious legal and regulatory risk — and hold that standard consistently.
Partner with Legal and Risk & Compliance to remain current on regulatory changes, and translate those changes into updated operational guidance, retraining, and revised SOPs in a timely and thorough manner.
Build structured knowledge management systems — including tiered training curricula, knowledge assessments, compliance playbooks, and escalation guides — that give the team durable, accessible tools for handling complex, ambiguous situations correctly.
Establish a compliance quality framework: define defect categories, track defect rates by manager and process stream, root-cause recurring issues, and drive targeted remediation programs.
Proactively identify compliance blind spots — areas where the team's knowledge or processes are insufficient to handle emerging business scenarios, regulatory changes, or technology shifts — and address them ahead of risk materialization.
Act as an escalation resource for complex, novel compliance questions that require judgment beyond standard SOPs; partner with Legal when matters exceed operational authority.
Own end-to-end accountability for WA operational delivery metrics — including SLA attainment, case quality, throughput, error rates, and customer experience — across all regions and vendor-supported workflows.
Own the identification and prioritization of process improvement opportunities across all operational streams, including intake, document review, verification, escalation handling, and vendor coordination.
Manage vendor team coordination and performance; ensure vendor SLAs, quality standards, and compliance obligations are met and that esca