Strategic Finance Business Partner

About Primer

Primer is a growing network of K–8 schools restoring the timeless foundations of American education. Inspired by the original teaching primers that shaped a nation of readers, thinkers, and builders, our schools begin with what has always worked, and build for what lies ahead. Close-knit learning environments. Skilled educators. A culture that takes kids seriously as learners and leaders.

Primers shaped the first 200 years of American children. Primer will ready them for the next.

About the role

This is a financial analysis and business partnership role at its core. You'll drive financial analysis for a national private school network that runs on PrimerOS, our learning and operations management platform. Reporting to our Head of Finance, you'll be the strategic business partner to functional leaders—helping them weigh tradeoffs, assess performance, and put our financial strategy into action.

What you’d own

• Site-level performance: partner with our state General Manager teams to own site-level forecasts, enabling the company to make decisions grounded in our financial realities and strategic priorities

• Real Estate: partner with the Real Estate team to drive the completeness and accuracy of our pro-forma modeling, returns forecasting, and project-level budget-vs-actual analyses.

• Business partnership: partner with cross-functional teams on a variety of operational decisions by providing guidance, analysis, and historical financial data to inform their decisions. You might be forecasting headcount one moment and budgeting paid marketing spend the next.

• Financial operations: partner with our Controller to ensure forward-looking views tie cleanly to actuals from our accounting system.

• Reporting: support our Monthly Business Review process and own the delivery of management financial reporting, both programmatic and ad hoc.

What we’re looking for

• 5-7 years of experience in corporate finance, include experience with financial modeling and reporting; experience in finance business partnership is a plus.

• This role spans real estate, capital planning, business partnership, and corporate finance - you should spike (have prior experience) in at least one area and be excited to become an expert at the rest.

• AI-forward: it’s been months since you built a model without using Claude, Codex, or the like. You’re oriented towards building from scratch only once.

• Resilient: we are a startup building in a complex problem space. You’ll need a builder mindset, bias towards enablement, and willingness to learn new things.

• You bring a diplomatic and trustworthy presence to the rooms you’re in; you are able to adapt your style for differing considerations and levels of financial sophistication.

• Financial acumen: you’ll be expected to provide clarity on decisions large and small, and to do so you’ll need to rely on the right mix of rigorous analysis and financial intuition.

Nice to haves

• Time spent in businesses with a real estate footprint (education, QSR, fitness, dentistry, etc.)

• Exposure to capital planning, project budgeting, and/or construction finance.

• Familiarity with some of: NetSuite, Ramp, Salesforce, Hex

Why this role may not be a fit

• You enjoy FP&A maintenance roles with limited responsibilities beyond traditional reporting calendars.

• You are unfamiliar with the scope of finance roles at startups or on lean finance teams.

• You don’t enjoy the work of business building - this isn’t the role for someone looking to build presentations and round to the nearest million.

Primer is a mission-first company. We believe our mission is the highest-leverage way we can create positive change. In service of that, we keep work centered on mission execution and avoid social or political activism at work that’s unrelated to the mission. If that energizes you, we’d love to see you apply.