Q&A with Silvia Benavides, Head of Sustainability for NA Operations

Everyone, meet Silvia Benavides !

Silvia is the Head of Sustainability for operations in North America. She is responsible for sustainability strategy and execution to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and waste from NA operations. Her team invests in decarbonization technologies in transportation, low-carbon materials, energy reduction and waste and works cross-functionally to include sustainability into decision-making and regular business cadences.

Silvia joined Amazon ten years ago and has led a large team in Customer Fulfillment as Operations Manager as well as an operation of 800 people in Technical Support as a Sr. Operations Manager. Silvia then transitioned to building new programs to support operations including analytics, change management and front-line communications. Before Amazon, Silvia worked in economic research and in strategy consulting. She holds a BA in Economics and a minor in Mathematics from the University of Costa Rica and an MBA from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Silvia, tell us! What accomplishment at Amazon are you most proud of?

When I was applying to business school, I had this vision that I wanted to learn Operations and then combine it with sustainability to maximize the positive impact I could bring to the planet. I joined Amazon in 2014 to learn about operations. In 2015, I scaled the Technical Support team from 400 to 800 employees to support growing demand for Kindles, Alexas and FireTVs. From 2017 to 2020, I built out new programs to support operations, including Analytics, Change Management and Safety Incident Reporting. In 2021, it was time for me to connect my operations experience with my passion for sustainability and built out the team from scratch to deliver results for our planet. We built out emissions forecasts to evaluate progress towards the Climate Pledge, defined strategic investments for the next three years and secured a budget for sustainability pilots. Today, I lead the Sustainability team for all of North America Operations and I am proud to be living my vision.

What's your current project about and are you hiring?

My team works on deploying solutions to decarbonize transportation, decarbonize buildings and reduce waste. We leverage innovation and mechanisms to bring sustainability into our decision-making and our processes. Cool projects and technologies include testing electric vehicles for new use cases, using low-carbon concrete in our launches and many others. We are hiring for experienced program managers that can influence cross-functionally or get energized when solving hard problems. We have opportunities for professionals with experience implementing low-carbon materials and energy efficiency; program managers with experience moving technologies from pilots to scale; and people with transportation decarbonization experience, including electrification.

What brings you passion/excitement to your role and team?

The fact that I work every day to leave the planet in a better place than where I find it makes me really passionate about my work. I grew up in Costa Rica, where the beauty of nature is abundant and there is a tradition of caring for nature. Sustainability allows me to connect my roots with my work. I have seen how applying a sustainability lens to solving business problems can be a source for innovation and out of the box thinking. One of our partners improved routing by finding instances to reduce fuel consumption because he was thinking about sustainability. It is truly exciting to help drive this at Amazon.

How do you foster diversity and inclusion on your team?

I am extremely proud of the diversity and inclusion on my team, with more than 50% of my team identifying with at least one diversity category. My team’s culture is about supporting each other to do our best work, we have ways to review each other’s proposals, challenge ideas and help the author keep building on what they already have. Every month, during development conversations, I check in on professional and personal goals to make sure a team member is able to be a full person, not just a worker. Finally, we are cognizant of time zones and vacations to ensure people have time to recharge.

How do you balance demands of work and personal goals?

I have two young kids (5 and 3) and they are the most important part of my life. I prioritize ruthlessly and schedule my day to spend time with them in the afternoons and to be able to attend school activities. To do this, I set expectations with my team so that they can make their own decisions and find me if they need additional support. To also take care of myself, I try to go to yoga at least twice a week, go on a bike ride in the morning or walk during calls to ensure I am moving my body.

What's the last book you read that left an impression on you?

I have so many! For business, I really enjoyed Originals by Adam Grant on how to think about innovation. Every 2-3 years I re-read The Good Jobs Strategy by Zeynep Ton because her frameworks about how to design jobs that are better for people and business really resonate with me. Outside of work, two books that really made an impression were: 1) The Art of Living by Thich Nhat Hanh, which talks about being present, and 2) the Invention of Nature by Andrea Wulf, which talks about how Alexander Von Humboldt defined many of the mental models that we use today to understand our natural world. All of these books are good examples of feeling comfortable doing things differently to drive progress in a particular space, skills that are much needed in the sustainability world.

Now that's e-mazing! Thanks for sharing your Amazon story, Silvia.

For open roles on Silvia's team, visit this page on amazon.jobs.