Senior Commercial Analyst - Trading & Shipping

At Ampol, we believe in the Power of Us - the extraordinary power of people to connect, act, and make a difference.  

As a leading energy company operating across Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and from the United States, our work spans fuel supply, energy solutions, convenience retail, infrastructure, trading and shipping. Every role at Ampol plays a part in something bigger - powering progress for our customers, communities, and people.  

Your career here is yours to shape. We back our people with real opportunities, the tools to grow, and a culture that rewards ownership and initiative. Whether you’re deepening your expertise or taking on something new, we’ll support you to power a career that works for you.  

We’re building a workplace where everyone feels welcome, respected, and valued - because when people are free to be themselves, powerful things happen.

About Ampol Trading & Shipping

Our purpose at Ampol is to power better journeys today and tomorrow. Our Trading and Shipping team is key to achieving this, not only supplying our customer’s needs today, but evolving as the energy transition takes place to supply our customers well into the future.

We take pride in our people and value innovation, sustainability, and customer satisfaction. If you’re a professional committed to excellence, Ampol is looking for you. Ampol's Trading & Shipping (T&S) Transformation & Governance team is building the data and analytical foundations that power our trading desks. We are looking for a seasoned Project Manager to lead end-to-end delivery of our data and analytics initiatives that involve solutions like Sigma, PowerBI, Snowflake/ Databricks, ZEMA to statistical and price modelling capabilities. 

About the Role

The Senior Commercial Analyst (Cross Bench/Refinery) plays a critical role in delivering high-quality, commercially relevant market analysis to support trading decisions across Ampol’s global Trading & Shipping business. 

This role strengthens Ampol’s refinery modelling and cross-barrel fundamentals capability, with deep expertise in refinery configurations, crude quality differentials, yield optimisation, blending economics and refinery margins. The Senior Commercial Analyst maintains a real-time view of global refinery operations, margins, outages, crude-slate shifts and refinery yields - translating these developments into clear implications for inter-product spreads, arbitrage, cracks and market structure. 

The role requires the ability to model refinery behaviour to anticipate shifts in the crude and product markets and translate market fundamentals to tradeable, actionable insights.  

Together with the Commercial Analysis team, the senior analyst builds and enhances global supply-demand and refining models, integrates market views across multiple desks, supports scenario analysis and helps shape trading strategies through structured interpretation of evolving market dynamics. 

The Senior Commercial Analyst also contributes to the T&S Data Analytics Roadmap, partnering with the Data Product team to develop scalable analytical frameworks, integrate richer datasets and strengthen Ampol’s end-to-end data and analytics capability to drive faster, more informed, commercially aligned decisions. 

Key Responsibilities

• Refinery Modelling - Build and maintain refinery yield, crude-slate and margin models to explain and anticipate shifts in refinery behaviour and product output. Track refinery utilisation, maintenance, configuration changes and crude-slate adjustments across key global hubs. Assess refining economics across regions to identify emerging product tightness, crude-quality shifts or margin drivers that matter most. 

• Centralised Fundamental Modelling & Forecasting - Deliver bottom-up refining supply model and consistent product-supply forecasts. Collaborate with data scientist to enhance models using robust, scalable analytical frameworks (econometrics, machine learning, statistical techniques). Ensure transparency, documentation and version controls of fundamental models and assumptions. Incorporate feedback and insights from broader team of traders and commercial analysts to improve model accuracy and commercial relevance. 

• Market Fundamentals & Cross-Barrel Insight - Produce timely, concise fundamental views on product balances, crude demand from refiners, run-rate changes and margin trends.  Connect refinery outputs with crude and product markets, freight, arbs, storage signals and regional price structure. Highlight developments that create dislocations, arb openings or spread opportunities. 

• Support Trading Decisions via Delivery of Timely Actionable Insights - Deliver clear, trade-focused insights that help anticipate price movements, helping the desk capture value across crude and products. Identify what matters commercially and communicate it succinctly. Clear understanding of how refinery events translate into cracks, spreads and structure. Challenge assumptions, provide scenario analysis and contribute differentiated views that strengthen trade idea generation. Facilitate discussions on fundamentals to support informed decision making. Drive engagement with broader team of traders and commercial analysts to support informed decision-making and alignment on market direction. 

• Monitor and Analyse Market Trends/Developments - Track micro and macro factors influencing physical and financial markets, including outages, geopolitics, sanctions, OPEC+ policy, weather, feedstock economics, macro trends, and inventories. Detect early signals of structural shifts and quantify their impact. 

• Support the Delivery of T&S Data Analytics Roadmap - Contribute to the delivery of the data analytics roadmap by collaborating with the Data Product and Data Science Team to build out T&S end-to-end data analytics capabilities. Enhance data ingestion, model automation and dashboarding to support proactive, data-driven trading discussions. 

• Cross-Functional Collaboration - 
  • Publish weekly and monthly market commentary with inputs from other team members.  
  • Engage with Trading and Shipping, Strategy, Business Development, or other parts of Ampol where relevant to share market developments and insights through various platforms and channels. Where relevant, perform topical analysis and support ad-hoc data requests. 
  • Track competitors’ activities into Australia and New Zealand, and in other geographies where relevant or required through ship tracking and other market intelligence. 
  • Support analysis and decision making in response to identified market changes, including product specification changes, contracting, regulatory changes, etc

Qualifications & Experience

• Tertiary qualification in a relevant discipline 
• Minimum of 7 years of oil market analysis experience, preferably in an oil trading and refining environment. 
• Demonstrate strong analytical capability and experience. 
• Strong grasp of refinery configurations, crude qualities, yield optimization, product blending and margin structures. Proven experience with refinery-run forecasting, product-output modelling or crude-slate analysis. 
• Ability to identify the commercial relevance of fundamentals and prioritise what matters for trading. 
• Self-starter with a drive for results and able to work independently in fast-moving markets. 
• Commitment to deliver continuous improvement and enhance existing analysis. 
• Clear, concise communication skills with an ability to engage traders and senior stakeholders, lead discussions and influence change.  
• Comfortable handling complex, technical arguments and simplifying for decision-makers.  
• Confidence to challenge assumptions and offer a differentiated view. 
• High level understanding of business drivers and key areas of influence. 
• Strong organisational skills with ability to prioritise under pressure. 
• Willingness to mentor and share knowledge with junior team members. 
• Collaborative team player who thrives in a fast-paced environment and ability to work effectively in a cross-functional team environment. 
• Excellent Excel skills, VBA, Python and SQL knowledge will be an advantage. 
• Good knowledge of visualisation tools