VP Business Intelligence & Insights

Job Description:

Rakuten International is a division of Rakuten Group, Inc., a Japanese global technology leader in services that empower individuals, communities, businesses and society. Headquartered in San Mateo, California with more than 4,000 employees worldwide, the Rakuten International business portfolio includes market leaders in e-commerce, digital marketing, advertising, communications and entertainment. We create products and services that provide exceptional value by aligning members and the businesses that want to engage them in a shared community. 

Rakuten is the most rewarding way to shop, giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform, Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty and wellness, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscriptions, and dining, helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999, Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind. Learn more at Rakuten.com.

Rakuten Rewards is creating a new VP, Business Intelligence & Insights role to centralize analytics and elevate it into an enterprise-level insight and decision-support function reporting directly to the CEO Office.

As analytics platforms and AI increasingly automate reporting, competitive advantage comes from judgment, context, and clarity-not dashboards. This role exists to ensure Rakuten Rewards has a single source of truth for business performance and a senior leader who can translate data into actionable insights that shape strategy, prioritization, and investment decisions.

What You’ll Do

Lead Enterprise Data & Insights Strategy

• Owns Rewards’ enterprise data and insights strategy for executive and operational decision-making (business-facing): defining how performance is measured, interpreted, and used to drive decisions
• Establish a single, trusted performance narrative across Product, Marketing, Commercial, and Finance.
• Define the enterprise analytics roadmap in close partnership with Data Platform and Engineering teams.

Elevate Executive Decision-Making

• Serve as a trusted thought partner to the CEO and executive leadership team.
• Translate complex data into clear insights, trade-offs, and recommendations that inform strategic decisions.
• Surface risks, inconsistencies, and blind spots-bringing intellectual rigor and honesty to leadership discussions.

Build & Lead a Centralized Insights Organization

• Unify analytics teams currently embedded across functions into a centralized Business Intelligence & Insights organization.
• Set enterprise standards for metrics, definitions, and performance interpretation.
• Build a high-performing team known for business acumen, credibility, and influence-not reporting volume.
• Act as a key partner with Product, Engineering, Finance, Marketing, and Sales to ensure data reporting/forecasts and insights for company, merchants and buyers are relevant, timely, and decision oriented and meet their ongoing business needs
• Examples for Areas of Support: While this role is enterprise in scope, examples of the types of decisions and analyses this organization supports include but not exhaustive:

Marketing & Growth

• Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) and incrementality analysis to inform marketing investment allocation
• Customer LTV, cohort, and payback analysis to guide acquisition and retention strategy

Commercial & Revenue

• Company-level and merchant-level revenue performance insights and forecasting
• Sales quota and target-setting analytics grounded in historical performance and pipeline dynamics
• Performance insights that inform prioritization across merchants, categories, and partnerships

AI-Enabled, Human-Led Analytics

• Define the business requirements, use cases, and success criteria for AI-enabled analytics in close partnership with the Data & AI Platform organization.
• Partner with Platform teams to ensure analytics tools and capabilities are aligned to enterprise insight needs and executive decision workflows.
• Leverage AI and automation to accelerate insight generation, while ensuring human judgment, business context, and leadership perspective guide interpretation.
• Ensure AI-powered analytics enhance decision quality and consistency—rather than creating parallel systems or fragmented interpretations.

How You’ll Work

• You’ll provide embedded functional support with measurable service levels while maintaining a single enterprise standard for metrics, interpretation, and performance truth.
• You’ll own enterprise clarity: metric definitions, performance interpretation, and decision-grade insights.
• This role does not own functional execution (marketing spend, product delivery, sales operations).
• Functional leaders retain accountability for outcomes, informed by insights produced by this organization.
• In close partnership with the Data & AI Platform and Engineering organizations-who own architecture and delivery-this role defines the enterprise analytics roadmap required to deliver decision-grade insights at scale.

What Success Looks Like

• Leadership aligns around a single version of performance truth.
• Executive decisions are faster, clearer, and more confident.
• Metrics are consistent, trusted, and directly tied to strategy.
• Analytics is viewed as a strategic advantage, not a support function.

What We’re Looking For

• 15+ years of senior leadership experience in analytics, business intelligence, or insights.
• Proven track record of influencing C-level decisions through data-driven insight and judgment.
• Experience centralizing or transforming analytics in complex, cross-functional organizations.
• Strong understanding of modern analytics and AI-enabled platforms, paired with sharp business intuition.
• Exceptional communicator with the confidence to challenge assumptions and elevate executive thinking.

This is an opportunity to define how Rakuten Rewards understands its business, makes decisions, and scales intelligently. If you are energized by turning data into clarity-and clarity into action-this role offers the scope and impact.

#LI-RM14

Five Principles for Success
Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen
Passionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best
Hypothesize - Practice - Validate – Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory
Maximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile
Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.

As part of our Rakuten interview process, we encourage applicants to use their own words, rather than AI-generated content. Tell us your story in a way that's personal and authentic.

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for discretionary bonus, health, vision, dental insurance, 401k matching, PTO, Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.

USD $178,767.00 - $333,720.00 annually