Senior Manager, Compensation Design

Position Overview

The Senior Manager, Compensation Design is responsible for developing compensation programs, frameworks, analytics, and recommendations that support business outcomes, market competitiveness, internal equity, and effective governance across Royal Caribbean Group’s shoreside populations.

Responsibilities

• Develop, implement, and maintain compensation frameworks, salary structures, market pricing approaches, and incentive programs that align with business priorities and talent strategy.

• Structure base pay practices, pay ranges, annual incentive opportunities, and variable compensation programs with clear governance, modeling, and implementation discipline.

• Lead the modeling, structuring, and evaluation of sales compensation plans, including plan mechanics, performance measures, pay mix, targets, funding approaches, and governance requirements.

• Build, optimize, and manage job evaluation methodologies, leveling frameworks, job architecture principles, and related governance.

• Build, review, and challenge financial models, forecasts, and scenario analyses related to compensation cycles, program design, budget allocation, and business cases.

• Translate complex data into clear insights, tradeoffs, implications, and recommendations for leadership decision-making.

• Apply AI, emerging technologies, and process improvement thinking to improve compensation workflows, increase scalability, reduce manual effort, and strengthen insight generation.

• Support and strengthen compensation governance, pay transparency, pay fairness, regulatory reporting, global pay equity analysis, remediation planning, and audit readiness.

• Partner with Brand leaders, HR, Finance, Legal, Payroll, Operations, Talent Acquisition, Talent Management, and other key stakeholders; manage compensation vendors and support escalation/remediation events with Compensation Delivery.

• Manage and develop direct reports while leading compensation workstreams with strong ownership, urgency, and quality; provide guidance, coaching, and technical oversight to support effective execution and consistent, decision-ready deliverables.

Knowledge & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Human Resources, Business, Finance, Economics, Statistics, or a related field.
• Master’s degree or relevant certification preferred.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in corporate compensation, Total Rewards consulting, or a related analytical/advisory field directly tied to rewards, workforce cost, incentive design, or compensation governance.
• Strong analytical capability, including advanced Excel skills, financial modeling, market data analysis, scenario planning, and interpretation of complex datasets.
• Demonstrated ability to independently build, review, audit, and challenge complex data and financial models.
• Experience with broad-based compensation, market pricing, job evaluation, job architecture, variable compensation, sales compensation, pay equity, or compensation governance.
• Proven ability to convert ambiguous business issues into structured workplans, clear analysis, and actionable recommendations.
• Strong business acumen and judgment; able to connect compensation design to talent strategy, financial objectives, stakeholder needs, governance, and operational realities.
• Strong consulting acumen and ability to influence without authority across HR, Finance, Legal, Payroll, Operations, Brand leaders, and the business; able to translate complex compensation issues into clear, business-relevant recommendations.
• Experience in large, matrixed, multi-brand, multinational, or highly complex organizations preferred.
• Experience with enterprise HRIS platforms, such as SuccessFactors or Workday; compensation systems; survey platforms; and analytics/visualization tools, such as Tableau or Power BI, preferred.
• Applied curiosity and fluency with AI, emerging technologies, and process improvement approaches to improve scalability, reduce manual work, and strengthen compensation insights.
• Customer-focused and results-oriented with a bias toward action; comfortable working in a fast-paced environment.