VP, Business Intelligence & Insights

Rakuten Rewards•San Mateo, CA

3d•$178,767 - $333,720

About The Position

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.

Requirements

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.

Responsibilities

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: 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.
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-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.
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—rather than creating parallel systems or fragmented interpretations.