Director, Descriptive Analytics
Santa Monica, CA

Job Description

Job Title: Director of Descriptive Analytics

Reporting To: Senior Director, Analytics

Department: Descriptive Analytics

Location: Santa Monica, CA

Your Mission

The Director of Descriptive Analytics will oversee in-game analysis, insights and reporting for Call of Duty and Emerging titles along with Sales and Studio operations. They will work closely with Internal Product Groups, Finance, Studios, Executive Management, and International partners along with Data and Technology organizations to deliver proactive and on-request insights to support day-to-day decision making and highlight new discoveries that drive strategic business unit decisions. The ideal candidate will have significant successful experience building and leading an analytics team, working with large data sets and making data-driven decisions.

Candidates must possess an uncanny ability to translate data and analytics into strong narratives for business stakeholders, grow that ability in their team members and embody effective leadership. The right candidate will have the passion, experience, skills, and abilities both to turn large and complex data sets into meaningful and actionable intelligence and coach that ability in their team members.

Key responsibilities:

* Set the strategy and roadmap for the Descriptive Analytics team. Assess high-impact opportunities for the business and partner with other leaders across the company, including product, studio, finance, engineering, and sales to understand their analytical needs and then develop reports/dashboards that meet those needs.
* Lead the team responsible for being the single source of truth for game - monetization, engagement, operations, sales, player experience, and reporting along with providing forecasts for sales, engagement and in-game monetization
* Ensure the team proactively performs as the first line of discovery highlighting shifts in the game mechanics, in-store anomalies, and player behavior
* Ensure the team delivers timely and dependable insights and intuitive automated tools for the Business Units, and Studio to make day-to-day decisions or address new discoveries, anomalies or issues
* Design reporting logic, perform UAT and support both data model and instrumentation engineering requirements
* Maintain a standard process to handle and answer recurring & ad-hoc reporting requests by different stakeholders
* Provide thought leadership in a number of areas: A|B testing, engagement and digital economy optimization, gamer profiling, churner profiling, and spender profiling, behavioral analysis, data strategy and analytic approaches
* Collaborate and build relationships with other departments in the Activision Publishing Analytics organization as well as the BU, studio, data and technology organizations
* Work with data engineers to build data pipelines, ETL processes and database schemas to ensure data is easily usable and dependable downstream.

Player Profile

* 9 years of experience in database analytics translating very large, complex and multi-dimensional datasets into strong business narratives
* Deep understanding of database and analytical technologies in the industry including MPP databases, noSQL storage, database design, BI reporting and dashboard development
* Master's degree preferred in decision sciences, mathematics, statistics, computer science / engineering or equivalent work experience.
* 4+ years of managing, recruiting and scaling highly productive analytics teams including managers
* An ability to write very complex SQL queries. (ETL and Python experience a plus.)
* Driven, proactive, self-starter and quick learner
* Experience working in cloud based database platforms such as Redshift and expansive / disparate data sets (gaming, personalized e-commerce, financial services, streaming) and understanding of ETL processes
* Uncanny ability to build relationships with partners, peers and stakeholders motivating others align and drive towards best practices and objective decision making
* A passion for diving into and experiencing the games and experiences Activision produces to ensure we are driving the strongest recommendations out of our rich data sets

Your Platform

We're headquartered in Santa Monica, California, housing multiple teams across many disciplines of Marketing, PR, Sales, Supply Chain and other corporate functions such as HR, IT, Legal, Facilities and Finance. Santa Monica is the nerve center of our company, where the best ideas combine with unrivalled rigor to create the biggest and best entertainment experiences in the world.

Our World

Great Games Start with Great People! This is an exciting time to join us!

Ask anyone who works at Activision, or with Activision, their favorite thing about it, and they'll tell you, it's the people. We have world class brands, infrastructure and resources, but our success doesn't come from assembly lines producing widgets. Our success comes from people producing greatness together. We are nothing without our employee's brilliance. So if you're interested in our biggest priority, it's the people.

Activision is more than just the leading developer and publisher of video games; we are the creators of some of the world's biggest, most ground-breaking titles in the industry. Our portfolio includes Call of Duty® and Crash Bandicoot™.

Activision is a division of Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ: ATVI), headquartered in Santa Monica, California with locations across the globe. Activision Blizzard is one of the world's largest and most successful interactive entertainment companies and is at the intersection of media, technology, and entertainment. A member of the S&P 500 and recognized on the 2018 FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For® list, Activision Blizzard has operations throughout the world with approximately 10,000 employees and players in 196 countries.

The video game industry and therefore our business is fast-paced and will continue to evolve. As such, the duties and responsibilities of this role may be changed as directed by the Company at any time to promote and support our business and relationships with industry partners.