VP, Business Intelligence & Insights

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 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 are not exhaustive:

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

• 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

• 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.

• 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,…