Lead Data Analyst (Manager Track) - Conversational Experiences Department (CXD)

Job Description:

Business Overview

The Rakuten Group, Inc. is a global leader in internet services that empower individuals, communities, businesses, and society. Founded in Tokyo in 1997 as an online marketplace, Rakuten has expanded to offer services in e-commerce, fintech, digital content, and communications to approximately 1.7 billion members around the world. The Rakuten Group has nearly 32,000 employees and operations in 30 countries and regions. For more information, visit https://global.rakuten.com/corp/

The AI & Data Division (AIDD) creates powerful, customer-focused search, recommendation, data science, advertising, marketing, price, and inventory optimization solutions for a variety of businesses across the Rakuten Group. As part of AIDD, the Conversational Experiences Department (CXD) focuses on AI for customer service. We build conversational AI products such as chatbots, voicebots, and copilot tools to support human operators.

Department Overview

You'll join a 60-person AI for Customer Service team of engineers, scientists, data analysts, and dialogue designers, responsible for modernizing legacy contact-center tooling and workloads into an agentic Generative AI stack codenamed Raptor. We already power more than 10 customer and sales support chat services. Now, we're in scale-up mode, expanding to all 70 BUs and using AI to multiply Rakuten's core capabilities in e-commerce, finance, logistics, digital content, and beyond.

Position:

Why We Hire

We believe products should be built on data: measured from day one, iterated on evidence, and judged by outcomes.

We are hiring a Lead Data Analyst to make that real. You will shape how our products are measured and how decisions get made, build a culture of experimentation, and lead the analysts who turn data into product direction. This is a hands-on leadership role: you stay close to the analysis yourself, challenging the team's thinking and reviewing their work to push for quality, robustness, and innovation.

You will work at the forefront of agentic data analytics, championing AI tools that let everyone across the team and the businesses we serve do data analytics, not just receive analytics tasks. You will lead a team modernizing customer service with an agentic Generative AI stack, now scaling across Rakuten's businesses. If you are passionate about building first-version (V1) data infrastructure where the bare minimum currently exists, and want your work to directly shape how a product team thinks and decides, this is the perfect opportunity for you.

Position Details

・Lead, coach, and develop a team of Data Analysts and Senior Data Analysts: day-to-day support, detailed work review, goal setting, and career development.

・Support hiring and organization planning for the analytics group.

・Set the group's standard for analytical rigor, reviewing the team's frameworks, KPI definitions, and deliverables.

・Own how the product organization measures success: define the KPI framework and the dashboards that track product health and user engagement.

・Direct the team's analysis through exploratory studies, hypothesis validation, and experiment results, feeding insights into the product roadmap.

・Own data infrastructure decisions from data pipelines to BI tools, keeping data accurate and accessible.

・Champion AI and agentic tools that enable team members and stakeholders to self-serve in data analytics: the mission is enabling everyone to do data analytics, not merely receiving data analytics tasks.

・Act as the analytics counterpart to Product Management and engineering leadership, from quantifying customer pain points to shaping what gets built next, and be the thinker who moves across the organization to identify and prioritize the big problems worth solving.

・Represent analytics to stakeholders across the Rakuten businesses we serve, turning analysis into decisions.

Mandatory Qualifications:

・More than 7 years of hands-on experience in data analytics, with a significant portion dedicated to product analytics.

・Experience leading data analysts: coaching, detailed work review, and developing people, with solid people management experience and the drive to stay hands-on.

・Experience partnering with Product Managers and engineering teams to solve complex business problems, including at senior stakeholder level.

・Demonstrated ability to translate business questions into analytical plans, and analysis results into business impact.

・Proven experience in data extraction, processing, and aggregation using SQL.

・Expertise with BI tools such as Tableau, DOMO, or Looker, including setting standards for dashboards and reporting.

・Fluent in English, with exceptional communication skills to collaborate effectively in a multinational environment.

・Japanese language proficiency at JLPT N2 or above, with experience communicating with business stakeholders in Japanese.

Desired Qualifications:

・Bachelor's or Master's degree in a quantitative field like Computer Science, Engineering, Statistics, or Mathematics.

・Experience scaling an analytics function from a small team to a larger, multi-domain organization.

・3 or more years directly managing a team of more than 3 data analysts, or a similar team.

・Excitement for agentic data analytics: building and using AI tools that raise the whole team's analytical capability.

・Experience processing and analyzing large-scale data using platforms like BigQuery or Databricks.

・Proficiency in data analysis, visualization, and statistical modeling using Python or R.

・Hands-on experience applying statistical methods to A/B testing, experimental design, and user behavior analysis.

・Experience in the customer communication as a service (CCaaS), communications technology, or AI-driven product space.

・A history of working on new products in a fast-paced, agile environment.

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