Senior Manager, Sales Compensation Systems & Analytics

Canva•San Francisco, CA

16d•Hybrid

About The Position

Join the team redefining how the world experiences design. Our flagship office is in Sydney, Australia, but we've made our way from down under, to a hub in San Francisco, which is now home to our US operations. We offer flexibility in how and where you work. We trust our Canvanauts to choose the balance that empowers them and their team to achieve their goals. About the role We’re looking for an experienced sales compensation leader to own the systems, data, reporting, and quarterly operating rhythm behind our global sales incentive programs. This role sits at the intersection of sales compensation, analytics, and technology. You’ll make sure our incentive platform is reliable, our compensation data is trusted, and leaders have a clear view of whether our plans are driving the intended outcomes. This is a senior individual contributor role with broad ownership and influence. You’ll work independently, using judgment to solve complex problems and seeking guidance only in the most complex situations. You may mentor teammates and lead cross-functional work, but direct people management is not the primary focus.

Requirements

8+ years of experience across sales compensation, incentive compensation systems, analytics, or related financial and operational work, with deep hands-on sales compensation experience.
Directly owned or administered an enterprise incentive compensation platform and can move comfortably between plan mechanics, system configuration, data validation, and stakeholder needs.
Strong analyst who can structure ambiguous questions, validate complex calculations, identify patterns, and connect findings back to business behavior.
Advanced Excel or Google Sheets skills and experience with Tableau or Snowflake.
SQL experience is strongly preferred.
Can build a compelling executive story from data and create clear, polished presentations.
Experience using Canva is preferred, and a willingness to become highly capable in the platform is essential.
Understand sales compensation design and operations at scale, including quotas, crediting, eligibility, accelerators, guarantees, plan documents, controls, and payout processing.
Led complex cross-functional projects with limited direction and can influence without formal authority, navigate differing stakeholder needs, and find common ground when decisions are high tension.
Strong judgment, curiosity, and ownership.
Comfortable creating structure in ambiguity, helping others make sound decisions, and lifting the capability of people around you.

Responsibilities

Own the sales incentive platform: Act as the business owner for the incentive compensation platform, including configuration, data flows, integrations, access, releases, vendor management, system performance, and issue resolution. Translate plan mechanics into accurate, scalable, and auditable system logic. Own requirements, testing, production validation, and change control. Build and prioritize the platform improvement roadmap across stakeholder needs. Simplify complex processes and solve new problems where established solutions do not exist.
Own compensation data and payout readiness: Own compensation data from source through payout, including eligibility, assignments, quotas, territories, crediting, rates, tiers, accelerators, and payment outputs. Lead recurring audits, reconciliations, and exception reviews. Proactively surface changes, risks, and root causes, then champion durable fixes. Partner with Sales Operations, People, Data Engineering, Revenue Accounting, Finance, and Payroll to maintain dependable data flows and on-time commission processing. Perform and validate complex or high-stakes sales compensation calculations.
Build reporting and plan health insights: Build the quarterly sales compensation QBR, creating a fact-based view of plan health, seller outcomes, operational performance, and emerging risks. Analyze attainment distributions, pay-for-performance alignment, payout-to-revenue ratios, incentive effectiveness, payout concentration, ramp outcomes, exceptions, error trends, and performance by role, segment, and region. Develop scalable dashboards and define the metrics, data structure, and quality standards needed for consistent decisions. Turn analysis into a clear point of view and build executive-ready Canva decks that explain what happened, why it matters, and what leaders should consider next.
Run annual/quarterly plan delivery: Own plan setup, participant mapping, compensation letter generation, quality assurance, distribution, acknowledgement tracking, and final records. Maintain accurate plan documents, rate tables, version history, and change logs. Create practical materials that help sellers and managers understand how performance translates into payout.
Strengthen governance and scale: Maintain audit-ready documentation and management review controls across the end-to-end commission process. Lead strategic projects and large-scale changes by setting clear outcomes, coordinating shared contributions, navigating competing priorities, and maintaining momentum. Establish operating standards and repeatable processes that improve accuracy, timeliness, transparency, and accountability. Use automation and AI thoughtfully while maintaining appropriate controls and human review.