# Global Retail and Logistics Group – Senior Finance Manager, Japan Operations
## About Us
We are a multinational retail and logistics group, and our Japanese business runs one of the larger fulfilment and delivery networks in the country. Our operations span inbound supply, warehousing sites and transportation, all supported by a finance organization that works closely with both local leadership and colleagues at our overseas head office. We are a workforce of many thousands of people worldwide, and in Japan we continue to grow the network and the technology behind it.
## The Role
We are hiring a senior finance leader to take ownership of planning, reporting and analysis for our Japanese operations, based at our head office in the Greater Tokyo area. You would sit at the centre of the operations finance function, partnering with business unit leaders, the Japan leadership team and stakeholders at our overseas headquarters, and you would lead a sizeable finance organization of your own. This is a permanent, full-time appointment with the breadth of a departmental head role: part analyst, part storyteller, part people leader.
## Responsibilities
Much of your work begins with measurement and governance. You would consolidate monthly, quarterly and annual results across several business units and turn them into a clear, honest account of how the network is performing. Weekly financial metrics are prepared and communicated to local leadership, and you would own both their accuracy and their interpretation. When the numbers raise questions, you would look for the root cause rather than the symptom, including where source data is incomplete or inconsistent, and put an escalation path in place. You would present your conclusions to senior executives in Japan and abroad, translating detailed financial material into narratives that leaders can actually decide on. Identifying where cost can be taken out and where growth can be accelerated is a standing part of the brief.
The second half of the role looks forward. You would run the full planning cycle for the operations business, covering inbound supply, fulfilment sites and transportation, and make sure the resulting plans hold together as a single, comprehensible story. Alongside that, you would push the finance function towards better tooling: new operational systems, automation frameworks and generative AI applications that make reporting faster and more scalable, with measurable improvements in control as the test of success. You would also build the team. That means hiring, coaching and developing finance professionals at earlier stages of their careers, mentoring across the wider business where it helps, and keeping a culture in which people share what they know and are expected to keep improving how the work gets done.
## What You’ll Bring
We are looking for a finance leader with well over a decade of experience, roughly twelve years or more, in finance, tax or a comparable analytical discipline, including around ten years spent analysing and reporting financial results. You should have spent eight years or so working with financial and operational KPIs, building report sets and data models that business decisions genuinely rest on, and designing process improvements through automation and analysis. Several years of hands-on experience using data reporting tools for both regular and ad hoc analysis is expected, as is a track record of directly leading a team of ten or more people over a number of years. A completed university degree in finance, accounting or a related field rounds out the profile.
Beyond that, a few things would count in your favour: an MBA or a professional accounting qualification such as CPA; a longer record of hiring and growing teams; experience running continuous improvement projects that scaled controllership with results you can point to; a habit of mentoring junior finance and business colleagues; and comfort working directly with executive-level stakeholders, including C-suite audiences.
## Unique Points About This Role
– A genuine departmental leadership mandate, with ownership of end-to-end planning, reporting and analysis for a national operations business. – Regular visibility with senior executives locally and with our overseas head office.
– A clear remit to modernize the finance function through automation and generative AI, rather than simply maintaining existing processes. – Time and resources to build your own fluency with new analytical and AI tooling, at a pace that suits you.
– A broad team to lead and develop, with hiring and coaching treated as core parts of the job rather than extras.
We are looking forward to receiving your application!