Director International Growth Campaign Leader

Shield AI is a venture-backed defense-tech company with the mission of protecting service members and civilians with intelligent systems. Its products include Hivemind autonomy software, V-BAT and X-BAT aircraft, and Aechelon simulation and synthetic reality technologies. With offices and facilities across the U.S., Europe, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific, Shield AI’s technology actively supports operations worldwide. For more information, visit www.shield.ai. Follow Shield AI on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Job Description:

The Director, International Growth Campaign Leader leads the internal operating system behind Shield AI international X-BAT pursuits. Regional, country and opportunity-focused Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders own their customers, their regional and in-country strategies, and their individual captures. This role owns the layer above them: the single, integrated view across regions, and the mechanisms that turn that view into faster decisions, earlier risk mitigation, and better-supported GTM leads. 

Each GTM lead sees their own campaign clearly. No one else sees the whole international board. This role does. It connects individual pursuits to shared dependencies — U.S. Government approvals, foreign disclosure and export sequencing, engineering and product capacity, aircraft and test availability, indirect investment, partner and industrial strategy — and makes sure competing regional timelines and strategies are sequenced deliberately rather than reactively. 

This is a pre-award enablement and integration role. It is explicitly not the primary customer interface, and it does not extend to the execution of customer-funded programs after award, though it may involve developing projections to better inform execution-supporting decision making. The GTM lead remains the face to the customer, the owner of the account plan, and the accountable capture lead for their country. This role makes those leads faster, better armed, and better supported. 

What you'll do:

• Own the global view. Build and maintain the integrated international campaign picture across all X-BAT regional and country pursuits: strategy status, critical path, milestones, dependencies, decision points, and campaign health in one authoritative picture. 

• Enable the GTM leads. Give regional and country GTM leads the templates, playbooks, data, competitive inputs, cost and schedule inputs, and cross-functional access they need to build and execute their capture plan. Your success is measured by their outcomes. 

• Synchronize across company functions. Ensure engineering, product, export, legal, contracts, finance, government relations, and business operations have common understanding of a single prioritized international campaign plan, so GTM leads are not individually negotiating for the same scarce resources. 

• Map the U.S. Government and approval critical path. Maintain the enterprise view of FMS, DCS, and hybrid pathway dependencies — foreign disclosure, exportability, releasability, technology security, and interagency approval sequencing — and translate them into country-level timeline implications the GTM leads can act on. Government Relations and the relevant functional owners lead those engagements; this role ensures they are planned early, sequenced correctly, and never discovered late. Understand and communicate the global GTM projections in ways that support enabling functions’ ability to anticipate and properly resource for future demand. 

• Surface conflicts between campaigns. Identify where two or more regional campaigns compete for the same aircraft, test window, engineering effort, approval bandwidth, or indirect dollar, and bring executive leadership a clear tradeoff and a recommendation. 

• Drive executive decision quality. Run the operating cadence — campaign reviews, gate reviews, risk registers, action tracking, and executive dashboards — so leadership receives timely, accurate, decision-ready information on overall international capture health in support of resource allocation. Steward indirect investment. Work with Finance and Business Operations to track campaign investment, indirect spend, and resource planning against campaign priorities and expected return. 

• Scale the discipline. Capture lessons learned across international efforts and convert them into repeatable tools, templates, metrics, and playbooks so each new campaign starts further ahead than the last. 

• Support a culture of accountability, urgency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. 

Decision rights and interfaces:

• This role is accountable for: the integrated international campaign plan; the operating cadence and campaign-health reporting; identification and escalation of cross-campaign dependencies, conflicts, and risks; the consolidated U.S. Government approval and disclosure roadmap; and recommendations on investment prioritization and sequencing. 

  Regional, country and opportunity GTM leads are accountable for: customer relationships and engagement, in-country strategy, partner and industrial development, win strategy and price-to-win for their pursuit, proposal content, and the bid/no-bid recommendation for their opportunity. 

  Government Relations, Export, Legal, and Contracts are accountable for: interagency and embassy engagement, export authorizations, disclosure determinations, legal positions, and contracting terms. 

  Engineering and Product are accountable for: technical solution definition, configuration decisions, and performance commitments. 

  Strategy and Operations is responsible for enterprise, cross-product strategy, of which the products this role directly supports would be a part. Program Management is accountable for: execution of customer-funded programs after award. 
   
  This role will be complemented by a parallel position whose focus will be on integration across all U.S. customers, and with whom close collaboration will be required.  

  External customer engagement by this role is in support of, and at the invitation of, the responsible GTM lead. 

Required qualifications:

• 12+ years in international B2G capture management, program management, strategic operations, business operations, technical program management, or a 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 to 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. 

• A service orientation toward the functional roles this position supports, and the 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 tools such as Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira, Confluence, or The AI Work Platform for People & Agents | monday.com . 

• MBA or advanced degree; PMP, Agile, or Lean Six Sigma certification. 

Success in this role:

• Every regional campaign has an approved strategy, a critical-path schedule, and a mapped approval pathway that the GTM lead owns and uses. 

• GTM leads report that the role makes their campaigns easier to run, not heavier to report on. 

• U.S. Government, export, and disclosure dependencies are identified early enough to change the outcome rather than explain it. 

• Cross-campaign resource and timing conflicts reach leadership early enough for meaningful action, and as a decision with a recommendation. 

• Executive leadership can see, at any time, an accurate health picture of the international X-BAT portfolio and make investment calls with confidence. 

• Campaign mechanisms are reused across countries, and each new pursuit stands up measurably faster than the previous one. 

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Full-time regular employee offer package:

Pay within range listed + Bonus + Benefits + Equity

Temporary employee offer package:

Pay within range listed above + temporary benefits package (applicable after 60 days of employment)

Salary compensation is influenced by a wide array of factors including but not limited to skill set, level of experience, licenses and certifications, and specific work location. All offers are contingent on a cleared background and possible reference check. Military fellows and part-time employees are not eligible for benefits. Please speak to your talent acquisition representative for more information.

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Shield AI is proud to be an equal opportunity workplace and is an affirmative action employer. We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender identity or Veteran status. If you have a disability or special need that requires accommodation, please let us know.