The posting, in Shield AI's own words
archived Oct 20, 2026Shield 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.
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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.