San Francisco Bay Area, California, United States, December 2025 — Sharon Padilla has stepped into a new leadership role as Vice President of Human Resources at Safeway. This move follows her recent tenure as Human Resources Director, marking a significant progression in her HR leadership journey within the organization and reinforcing Safeway’s focus on strengthening people strategy across its operations.
In her recent journey at Safeway, Sharon Padilla has advanced quickly across senior HR leadership responsibilities. After serving for nearly two years as Human Resources Director in the San Francisco Bay Area, she has now taken on the broader mandate of Vice President of Human Resources, positioning her to shape enterprise-level people priorities and culture outcomes within the Safeway ecosystem.
Before joining Safeway, she spent close to three and a half years with Old Navy in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she served as Human Resources Director and earlier as Senior Regional HR Manager. In these roles, she led large-scale field HR strategy, supported expansive multi-state operations, and partnered closely with senior leadership to build talent pipelines, strengthen engagement, and drive culture and change priorities across complex retail footprints.
Earlier, Sharon Padilla served for about a year as Senior HR Business Partner at Community Brands in the Austin, Texas area, where she supported multinational teams and helped shape HR strategy in a post-merger environment, with an emphasis on organizational design, performance systems, and global capability building.
She also brought her expertise to specialized assignments as an HR Consultant, including a short-term advisory role with Gymboree during its Chapter 7 bankruptcy process, and a leadership stint with Verizon Wireless as Senior Manager, HR Business Partners, where she led people strategy across multiple regions.
Her earlier foundation includes HR leadership in manufacturing and multi-plant environments at Pasta Prima (Valley Fine Foods) and strong people-and-performance exposure through frontline and district leadership roles with The Estée Lauder Companies, reflecting a career that blends deep retail field experience with enterprise HR and transformation capabilities.
About Safeway
Safeway operates as a banner of Albertsons Companies, one of the largest food and drug retailers in the United States. Albertsons Companies runs stores across 34 states and the District of Columbia under well-known banners including Safeway, Albertsons, Vons, Jewel-Osco, Shaw’s, Acme, Tom Thumb, Randalls, Star Market, and others.
With a strong community footprint, Albertsons Companies is committed to helping people live better lives by supporting neighborhood-level initiatives across hunger relief, education, health, and social impact, backed by significant food and financial contributions through the company and its foundation.
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