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Shield AI is seeking a Director, USAF Growth Campaign Leader to lead the internal operating rhythm enabling Shield AI's unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) pursuits with the United States Air Force. This is a senior, high-visibility role with significant authority and influence across the organization.
In this position, you will own the integrated USAF campaign picture across all X-BAT Family of Systems (FoS) pursuits, representing a multi-billion-dollar addressable opportunity. You will serve as the connective tissue between opportunity-focused Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders and executive leadership, providing the VP of Mission Solutions with a clear, decision-ready view of campaign health, priorities, dependencies, risks, mitigations, and resource requirements.
Key responsibilities include:
• Building and maintaining the authoritative USAF campaign picture across all X-BAT FoS pursuits, tracking strategy status, critical path, milestones, dependencies, decision points, and overall campaign health.
• Enabling GTM leads by providing templates, playbooks, competitive data, cost and schedule inputs, and cross-functional access needed to build and execute capture plans.
• Synchronizing functions across engineering, product, export, legal, contracts, finance, government relations, and business operations against a single prioritized campaign plan to eliminate redundant resource negotiations.
• Identifying and surfacing conflicts between campaigns competing for aircraft, test windows, engineering effort, approval bandwidth, or indirect dollars, bringing leadership clear tradeoffs and recommendations.
• Running the operating cadence—campaign reviews, gate reviews, risk registers, action tracking, and executive dashboards—to ensure leadership receives timely, accurate, decision-ready information on bid/no-bid, investment, and prioritization decisions.
• Stewarding indirect investment in partnership with Finance and Business Operations, tracking campaign spend and resource planning against priorities and expected return.
• Systematically capturing and scaling lessons learned across capture efforts into repeatable tools, templates, metrics, and playbooks.
• Personally driving execution of critical customer responses (RFI, RFP, CSO, and other solicitation vehicles), assembling cross-functional inputs and holding response schedules while GTM leads retain ownership of win strategy and proposal content.
This role operates with leadership by influence, leveraging dedicated capture-operations and analyst support, with the expectation to build the team as the portfolio scales. You will hold a standing seat in USAF bid/no-bid and investment-prioritization reviews and set the agenda for executive campaign reviews. This is positioned as a pipeline role toward senior Department of the Navy growth or general-management leadership at Shield AI.
Required Qualifications:
• U.S. person as defined by ITAR (22 CFR 120.62), with ability to obtain and maintain a DoD Top Secret/SCI clearance and Special Access Program (SAP) eligibility.
• 12–20+ years in 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 how USAF programs are funded and fielded, including SAF/AQ and HAF staffing processes, PEO and program-office dynamics, PPBE/POM cycle, and rapid-acquisition pathways (OTAs, CSOs, SBIR/STRATFI, AFWERX, prototype-to-program-of-record transitions).
• Proven ability to influence without direct authority and drive accountability across functions and geographies.
• Strong executive communication skills: leadership briefings, dashboards, metrics, and decision-support materials that drive decisions.
• 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 GTM leads and judgment to know when to escalate versus resolve quietly.
Preferred Qualifications:
• Active DoD Top Secret/SCI clearance and current Special Access Program accesses.
• Experience supporting defense, aerospace, autonomy, robotics, aviation, or defense-technology organizations.
• Experience in business development, capture, proposal operations, strategic planning, or growth organizations running multiple concurrent U.S. Government pursuits.
• Familiarity with export and international mechanisms shaping USAF pursuits (foreign disclosure determinations, FMS/DCS pathways, security cooperation planning).
• 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.
• Fluency with integrated schedule and work-management tools (Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira); MBA, PMP, or Lean Six Sigma certification is a plus but not required.
