VP, Business Intelligence & Insights
Job Summary
Rakuten Rewards is seeking a VP, Business Intelligence & Insights to centralize analytics and elevate it into an enterprise-level insight and decision-support function. This role will serve as a trusted thought partner to the CEO and executive leadership team, translating complex data into clear insights that inform strategic 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: 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.
Areas of Support: Examples of the types of decisions and analyses this organization supports include but are not limited to: 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—not create parallel systems or fragmented interpretations.
How You’ll Work
Provide embedded functional support with measurable service levels while maintaining a single enterprise standard for metrics, interpretation, and performance truth.
Own enterprise clarity: metric definitions, performance interpretation, and decision-grade insights.
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.
Five Principles for Success
Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success
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
Company Information
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.
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.