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Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company developing autonomous systems, aircraft, and simulation technologies for military and civilian protection. This Director role leads international growth strategy and campaign execution across multiple regions and countries.
You will own the integrated global view of all international X-BAT regional and country pursuits, maintaining a single authoritative picture of strategy status, critical path, milestones, dependencies, decision points, and campaign health. You enable regional and country go-to-market (GTM) leads by providing templates, playbooks, competitive intelligence, cost and schedule inputs, and cross-functional access to build and execute capture plans. Your success is measured by their outcomes.
Key responsibilities include synchronizing across company functions—ensuring engineering, product, export, legal, contracts, finance, government relations, and business operations maintain common understanding of a single prioritized international campaign plan. You map the U.S. Government approval critical path, maintaining enterprise visibility of FMS, DCS, and hybrid pathway dependencies including foreign disclosure, exportability, releasability, technology security, and interagency approval sequencing. You translate these into country-level timeline implications GTM leads can act on, ensuring government relations and functional owners are planned early, sequenced correctly, and never surprised late.
You surface conflicts between campaigns—identifying where regional efforts compete for aircraft, test windows, engineering effort, approval bandwidth, or budget—and bring executive leadership clear tradeoffs with recommendations. You drive executive decision quality by running the operating cadence (campaign reviews, gate reviews, risk registers, action tracking, executive dashboards) so leadership receives timely, accurate, decision-ready information on international capture health. You steward indirect investment by tracking campaign spend and resource planning against priorities and expected return.
You scale discipline by capturing lessons learned and converting them into repeatable tools, templates, metrics, and playbooks so each new campaign starts further ahead. You support a culture of accountability, urgency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.
This role is accountable for the integrated international campaign plan, operating cadence and campaign-health reporting, identification and escalation of cross-campaign dependencies and conflicts, the consolidated U.S. Government approval and disclosure roadmap, and recommendations on investment prioritization and sequencing. You will work closely with a parallel position focused on U.S. customer integration.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years in international B2G capture management, program management, strategic operations, business operations, technical program management, or comparable cross-functional leadership role
- Demonstrated success leading highly complex initiatives with multiple interdependent workstreams across engineering, business development, operations, finance, and executive leadership
- Working knowledge of international defense pursuit dependencies, including FMS, DCS, or hybrid acquisition pathways and the approval, disclosure, and exportability sequencing that governs them
- Proven ability to influence without direct authority and drive accountability across functions and geographies
- Strong executive communication: leadership briefings, dashboards, metrics, and decision-support materials that lead to decisions rather than discussion
- Deep operational rigor in integrated schedules, critical path, milestones, action tracking, dependency management, and risk mitigation
- Comfort operating in ambiguous, fast-changing environments with competing priorities across multiple time zones
- Service orientation toward functional roles this position supports, with judgment to know when to escalate versus resolve quietly
- Demonstrated alignment with Shield AI core values: Do What Honor Dictates, Live as a Servant Leader, Pursue Excellence
- Ability to travel domestically and internationally as required, and to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS:
- Experience supporting Department of War, aerospace, autonomy, robotics, aviation, or defense-technology organizations
- Experience within B2G business development, capture, proposal operations, strategic planning, or growth organizations running multiple concurrent international pursuits
- Familiarity with U.S. Government international engagement mechanisms such as foreign disclosure processes, security cooperation planning, embassy and country team coordination, or interagency advocacy
- Experience building executive dashboards, KPIs, operational scorecards, or portfolio health metrics
- Experience supporting executive staff, chief-of-staff organizations, Strategy and Operations teams, or enterprise PMOs
- Experience with Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira, Confluence, or monday.com
- MBA or advanced degree; PMP, Agile, or Lean Six Sigma certification
