Director, USAF Growth Campaign Leader… at Shield AI · Washington

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, USAF Growth Campaign Leader leads the internal operating rhythm that enables Shield AI’s UAS pursuits with the United States Air Force. Opportunity-focused Go-To-Market (GTM) leaders retain ownership of their customers, capture strategies, account plans, and individual pursuits. This role serves as the connective tissue across those leaders, integrating information across the USAF portfolio and providing the VP, Mission Solutions for the X-BAT FoS with a clear, decision-ready view of campaign health, priorities, dependencies, risks, mitigations, and resource requirements.

The Director connects USAF pursuits with relevant activity across other Services, allied and partner nations, product and engineering, government approvals, aircraft and test availability, internal investment, and industrial strategy. The role identifies shared dependencies and resource conflicts early, helps sequence competing demands, and coordinates the cross-functional support required for GTM leads to execute their captures effectively.

The role maintains the authoritative USAF campaign picture and runs the operating cadence that turns portfolio insight into action. This includes campaign reviews, risk and dependency management, executive dashboards, action tracking, investment recommendations, and escalation of decisions requiring VP or executive attention. The Director ensures that information flows efficiently from the GTM organization to the VP, Mission Solutions and that leadership receives clear recommendations rather than unstructured reporting.

GTM leads remain accountable for customer engagement, account planning, capture strategy, win strategy, price-to-win, proposal content, and pursuit outcomes. The Director enables their success by improving coordination, reducing friction around shared resources, and ensuring that the broader organization is aligned behind the highest-priority USAF opportunities.

Scope & authority:

• This is a senior, high-visibility seat with authority, not a reporting function:

• Portfolio: Concurrent USAF pursuits across the X-BAT FoS, representing a multi-billion-dollar addressable opportunity.

• Team: Leadership by influence role, leveraging dedicated capture-operations and analyst support, with the expectation to build the team as the portfolio scales.

• Investment: Develops and co-stewards annual campaign and indirect investment against prioritized campaign returns.

• Governance: holds a standing seat in USAF bid/no-bid and investment-prioritization reviews and sets the agenda for the executive campaign review.

• Growth path: a pipeline role toward senior Department of the Navy growth or general-management leadership at Shield AI.

What you'll do:

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

• Enable GTM leads. Give each GTM lead the templates, playbooks, data, competitive inputs, cost and schedule inputs, and cross-functional access they need to build and execute their own capture plan. Success is measured by their outcomes, not by your visibility.

• Synchronize functions. Coordinate engineering, product, export, legal, contracts, finance, government relations, and business operations against a single prioritized campaign plan so GTM leads are not individually negotiating for the same scarce resources.

• Surface conflicts between campaigns. Identify where two or more 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 bid/no-bid, investment, and prioritization.

• 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 discipline. Systematically capture lessons learned across capture efforts—both what worked and what did not, and translate them into repeatable tools, templates, metrics, and playbooks so every new campaign begins with a stronger foundation than the last.

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

• Roll up your sleeves. Personally drive the execution of critical customer responses (RFI, RFP, CSO, and other solicitation vehicles) — assembling cross-functional inputs, holding the response schedule, and driving on-time submission, while the GTM lead retains ownership of win strategy, price-to-win, and proposal content.

Decision rights & interfaces:

• This role is accountable for: the integrated USAF campaign plan; the operating cadence and campaign-health reporting; identification and escalation of cross-campaign dependencies, conflicts, and risks; path-to-win roadmap; and recommendations on investment prioritization and sequencing.

• Opportunity GTM leads are accountable for: customer relationships and engagement, capture strategy, 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: data-rights, political and legislative engagements and outcomes, disclosure determinations, legal positions, and contracting terms.

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

• Program Management is accountable for: execution of customer-funded programs after award.

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

Required qualifications:

• U.S. person as defined by ITAR (22 CFR 120.62), with the 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 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 how USAF programs actually get funded and fielded — SAF/AQ and HAF staffing processes, PEO and program-office dynamics, the PPBE/POM cycle, and rapid-acquisition pathways such as OTAs, CSOs, SBIR/STRATFI, AFWERX, and the transition from prototype to program of record.

• 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 GTM leads this role supports, and the 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 DoW, aerospace, autonomy, robotics, aviation, or defense-technology organizations.

• Experience within business development, capture, proposal operations, strategic planning, or growth organizations running multiple concurrent U.S. Government pursuits.

• Familiarity with the export and international mechanisms that shape USAF pursuits — foreign disclosure determinations, FMS/DCS pathways, and security cooperation planning — where allied demand affects the USAF business case.

• 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 tooling (e.g., Microsoft Project, Smartsheet, Jira), and an advanced degree or relevant certification (MBA, PMP, Lean Six Sigma) is a plus but not required.

Success in this role:

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

• USAF path-to-win is in place and running on a predictable, repeatable cadence that the organization can plan against.

• Cross-campaign resource and timing conflicts reach leadership as a decision with a recommendation.

• Executive leadership have an accurate health picture of the USAF X-BAT FoS portfolio and make investment calls with confidence.

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

How we work:

• Shield AI’s core values — Do What Honor Dictates, Live as a Servant Leader, and Pursue Excellence — are how we hire, promote, and make hard calls. This role in particular demands servant leadership: success is measured by the outcomes of the GTM leads it supports.

  Veterans and transitioning service members: we actively seek candidates with U.S. Air Force operational, staff, or acquisition experience, and we support military-to-civilian transitions.

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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.

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.