Principal Finance Business Partner | Adelaide

As a Finance Business Partner, you will operate as a trusted advisor to functional leaders, helping shape strategic priorities, optimise resource allocation, and deliver value through disciplined cost management and informed decision making. You will play a critical role in planning, forecasting, performance analysis and investment prioritisation across a diverse portfolio of functions. The role requires strong stakeholder engagement, commercial acumen, and the ability to translate complex operational and functional activities into clear financial insights.

This position provides significant exposure to senior leadership across Copper South Australia and offers the opportunity to influence both operational and strategic outcomes.

Key Accountabilities:

• Partner with functional leadership teams to develop financial plans, forecasts and performance targets aligned to asset strategy.

• Provide financial insights and challenge to support cost management, resource allocation and value delivery across the portfolio.

• Support business planning, budget development and forecasting processes, ensuring clear visibility of risks and opportunities.

• Review and challenge investment proposals, business cases and improvement initiatives to support effective capital and operating expenditure decisions.

• Deliver high-quality analysis and reporting that supports decision making and provides actionable insights for leaders.

• Support leadership teams in understanding financial performance drivers and the implications of strategic and operational decisions.

• Identify and implement opportunities to simplify, standardise and continuously improve finance processes and reporting.

• Build strong relationships across the asset and broader Finance community to ensure alignment and effective outcomes.

To be successful in this role, you will be comfortable navigating a complex stakeholder environment and managing competing priorities while maintaining a strong focus on value creation and business outcomes. You will bring strong commercial judgement, curiosity and the confidence to challenge assumptions while partnering constructively with leaders. The ability to communicate complex financial concepts in a simple and compelling way will be critical to success.

You will also have a demonstrated ability to build trusted relationships, influence decision making and support leaders in balancing strategic priorities with financial discipline.

Key experience and attributes:

• Experience working in a finance role, or in a technical/engineering role with strong commercial accountability and exposure to financial decision making.

• Demonstrated experience supporting cost, productivity or value based decisions in an operational or asset focused environment.

• Ability to work with operational and functional stakeholders to develop, review and challenge financial plans, assumptions and outcomes.

• Ability to communicate financial insights, recommendations and risks clearly in both written and verbal form.

• Working knowledge of accounting and reporting requirements, governance and risk, with exposure to tax or broader corporate finance advantageous.

• Experience working with technical specialists and turning complex issues into clear, practical analysis and business cases.

• Tertiary qualifications in Finance, Commerce, Accounting or Engineering (desirable).