Staff Sales Operations Analyst, Compensation Design

Illumina•San Diego, CA

32d

About The Position

This role is responsible for designing, analyzing, and optimizing Illumina’s global sales compensation programs, ensuring they drive the right behaviors, support revenue growth, and align with Illumina’s commercial strategy. The ideal candidate will lead the development, evaluation, and continuous improvement of incentive compensation plans, partnering closely with Sales, Finance, HR, and Field/Sales Operations. This includes overseeing compensation modeling, compensation and sales performance analytics, compensation governance, and cross functional alignment to ensure plans are fair, motivating, and scalable. The candidate will also contribute to broader Sales Performance Management initiatives and support process standardization, systems optimization, and effectiveness measurement.

Requirements

The ideal candidate will possess strategic planning capability mixed with an outstanding ability to drive execution and adoption of operational enhancements.
Strong experience in sales compensation design, sales strategy, or Sales Performance Management.
Ability to evaluate solutions from both a near term and long-term perspective.
Demonstrated ability to analyze complex data sets and model compensation outcomes.
Comfort with Excel and the ability to analyze data to evaluate KPIs and help guide decisions making.
Strong understanding of various sales roles and incentive mechanics.
Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain compensation concepts to technical and non technical audiences.
Ability to influence senior stakeholders and drive consensus around compensation decisions.
Strong organizational skills; able to manage multiple planning cycles and initiatives in a fast paced environment.
Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree; or 6 years and a Master’s degree

Nice To Haves

Experience with quota methodologies, sales incentive tools (e.g. Xactly, OneStream, Anaplan), or SPM platforms is a plus.

Responsibilities

Assist with the strategy and design for the Global Incentive Compensation Program including facilitation of the annual planning process, ongoing special programs and predictive analytics to support plan change recommendations.
Evaluate compensation plan effectiveness through analytics, performance modeling, benchmarking, and scenario testing.
Refine existing, define new and standardize sales policies & processes across the global organization and multiple sales channels to improve operational efficiency, sales productivity and customer satisfaction.
Serve as a subject matter expert on compensation plan mechanics, governance, and design principles.
Partner closely with the compensation administration team to communicate plan designs, updates, and special programs, ensuring accurate system setup and seamless rollout.
Coordinates with global sales training to ensure effective content delivery to sales, sales management, and sales support personnel.
Achievement of strategic objectives defined by company management.
Fosters close, cooperative relationships with peer leaders, sales management, and sales and support personnel.