Strategic Business Operations Manager

Job Description:

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 is the most rewarding way to shop, giving millions of members Cash Back when they buy from their favorite brands. As a leading shopping platform, Rakuten partners with thousands of top brands across apparel, beauty and wellness, grocery, travel, on-demand services, subscriptions, and dining, helping members save on everyday purchases. Since 1999, Rakuten members have earned more than $4.6 billion in Cash Back, making it the largest Cash Back platform of its kind. Learn more at Rakuten.com.

Job Summary:

This role operates at the enterprise level and reports to the Chief of Staff to the CEO. The position partners closely with senior leaders across the organization to strengthen how the company plans, decides, and executes. The focus is on translating strategy into effective operating mechanisms, improving decision quality and follow-through, and creating visibility across priorities, tradeoffs, and outcomes.

This is not a people leadership, program management, or functional ownership role. Instead, the role enables leaders to operate more effectively at scale through influence, structure, and clarity.

Key Responsibilities:

• Translate annual and multi-year strategic priorities into clear operating plans, milestones, and review cadences that connect leadership intent to measurable outcomes.
• Structure executive and leadership discussions, including OKR and priority-setting forums, to surface tradeoffs, drive decisions, and ensure commitments are documented and followed through.
• Own and continuously improve the company’s enterprise operating rhythm, including executive planning sessions, leadership offsites, All Hands, and quarterly and annual business reviews.
• Maintain enterprise-level visibility into critical initiatives, dependencies, risks, and outcomes, surfacing issues early and aligning leaders on mitigation and course correction.
• Design and maintain KPI frameworks, dashboards, and reporting mechanisms that inform executive decision-making and reinforce accountability.
• Develop executive-ready insights, recommendations, and materials for senior leadership consumption.
• Contribute to competitive and market analyses in support of decision-making, partnering with relevant internal teams and Rakuten international as needed.
• Use Claude and similar AI tools to produce first-pass drafts of executive materials and rapid competitive scans; build simple, repeatable prompt/agent workflows to standardize outputs and reduce cycle time for exec cadence.
  
  

Qualifications:

• Proven ability to operate independently in highly ambiguous environments with limited precedent.
• Demonstrated experience partnering directly with senior executives and influencing outcomes without formal authority.
• Strong executive presence with the ability to adapt communication style and persuade diverse stakeholders.
• Experience shaping enterprise operating models, planning processes, or decision frameworks.
• Highly analytical, with the ability to synthesize complex information into clear, executive-ready insights.
• Motivated by improving how an organization runs rather than owning a single function or team.
• Experience utilizing generative AI tools (e.g., Claude, ChatGPT, Bard) for content creation and workflow automation in a professional setting.
  
  

Minimum Requirement:

• Bachelor's Degree required
• 7 years of experience in Strategy & Operations, Business Operations, Consulting, Corporate Strategy, or a Chief of Staff-adjacent role; 8–10 years preferred.
  
  

Preferable Skills:

• Regularly uses Claude for structured analysis and synthesis in executive-facing work (turning messy inputs into crisp narratives and recommendations).
• Has built reusable Claude prompt libraries/“skills” and lightweight agent workflows for recurring operating tasks (KPI commentary, risk register updates, meeting pre-reads, decision/action logs).
• Demonstrates disciplined AI usage: no sensitive data leakage, validates key claims, and cites/links sources for anything externally derived.
  
  

Five Principles for Success

Our worldwide practices describe specific behaviors that make Rakuten unique and united across the world. We expect Rakuten employees to model these 5 Shugi Principles of Success.

Always improve, Always Advance - Only be satisfied with complete success - Kaizen

Passionately Professional - Take an uncompromising approach to your work and be determined to be the best

Hypothesize - Practice - Validate – Shikumika - Use the Rakuten Cycle to succeed in unknown territory

Maximize Customer Satisfaction - The greatest satisfaction for our teams is seeing their customers smile

Speed!! Speed!! Speed!! - Always be conscious of time - take charge, set clear goals, and engage your team

Rakuten provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type. Rakuten considers applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetic information, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, provincial or local laws.

At the time of posting, Rakuten expects the base compensation for this role to be within the range shown below. Individual compensation will vary based on job-related factors, including the skills, qualifications, and experience of the successful candidate as well as business need and geographic location. The successful applicant for this role will be eligible for discretionary bonus, health, vision, dental insurance, 401k matching, PTO, Volunteer Time Off (VTO), and other employee benefits as the company implements.

USD $78,651.00 - $135,216.00 annually