Solution Manager - Data & Analytics

Why BAT Japan
Genuinely large, genuinely messy consumer datasets — and decisions that are commercial rather than theoretical.

• Real users, a real budget and a team that reports into you

• A market-leading annual performance bonus (subject to eligibility)

• Health cover, transport support and a flexible holiday plan with additional incentives

• English and Japanese language training, delivered on company time

• A published capability framework for every role and grade — so you know precisely what the next grade requires, not just that progression exists

• Global Top Employer for the ninth consecutive year — certified across five regions and a record 44 countries

Tokyo, Japan · Full-time · Manager

Lead a data team where the output changes what the business does — not where it goes into a deck.

BAT is a global multi-category consumer goods business. Our purpose is to create A Better Tomorrow™, with a vision to build a smokeless world — as at 31 December 2025, 34.1m consumers used our Smokeless Products, generating 18.2% of Group revenue. Understanding those consumers, market by market, is now a core capability rather than a support function. In North Asia, you would lead the team that provides it.

The role
You lead a team of data scientists, data engineers and BI engineers building analytics products for the Japan and Korea business. You're the single point of contact between senior business stakeholders and the technical team — which means translating vague business questions into buildable specifications, and having the confidence to say no to requests that aren't worth the team's time. Protecting your team from an unfiltered demand queue is part of the job description, not a nice-to-have.

What you'll own

• The analytics products for our North Asia business, end to end — design, build, release, and what happens to them afterwards

• The roadmap and prioritised backlog, built with Marketing, Commercial and Finance leaders rather than handed to them

• The case for analytics with senior stakeholders — showing, concretely, how it moves the profit and loss

• Investment and benefit tracking: what we spent, what came back, and whether to keep going

• Adoption — getting analysts across the business using the tools, not just admiring them

• Data governance and privacy compliance by design, including Japan's APPI and Korea's PIPA

• Quality and workload of your team and offshore partners — including preventing burnout through honest scoping

What you'll bring

• A track record as a product owner who behaves like a strategic partner, not an order-taker

• The assertiveness to deprioritise non-strategic requests and hold the line on governance

• Working knowledge of data privacy standards such as APPI and PIPA

• Experience running multi-market roadmaps in a project management tool such as Asana

• Useful, not essential: trade marketing and distribution experience; Java or JavaScript

Qualifications

• 4+ years building and leading data and analytics or business intelligence systems, with hands-on SQL, Power BI, Python or R, data modelling, data lake architectures and the Microsoft data stack

• 2+ years leading a data team, and evidence you turn ambiguous business questions into specifications that don't get rebuilt twice

• Fluent Japanese and English. Korean or Chinese is a bonus