Director of Business Development, Middle East

We are hiring a Director of Business Development to lead our Middle East growth strategy, building out a team responsible for significant annual orders targets. The ideal candidate will have deep defense, national security, or aerospace experience in the region, established government relationships, and a track record of closing complex defense programs.

Key responsibilities include:

• Owning and executing Middle East go-to-market strategy for Shield AI's product portfolio, including X-BAT, V-BAT, ViDAR, and Hivemind.
• Maintaining direct responsibility for annual order targets, multi-year pipeline development, and order growth.
• Leading end-to-end capture and sales efforts from early engagement through contract award and follow-on growth.
• Engaging directly with senior military, government, and defense industry stakeholders across the region.
• Differentiating Shield AI in competitive and regulated defense procurements.
• Providing actionable market and customer intelligence to influence product roadmap and broader international strategy.

Requirements include:

• 10+ years business development experience across the Middle East region within defense, aerospace, or national security.
• Specific prior defense or government-facing experience in the Middle East with a deep understanding of regional procurement processes, offset requirements, export sensitivities, local defense primes, and indigenization requirements.
• Fluency in English (written and spoken). Fluency in Arabic strongly preferred.
• Demonstrated success closing complex defense or government programs - ideally across both hardware (aircraft/UAS) and software (autonomy/ai).
• Technical experience with autonomy, UAVs, ISR, and advanced sensing technologies.
• Strong negotiation, relationship-building, and stakeholder management skills.
• Ability to manage multiple concurrent pursuits, across multiple markets, involving technical products, in ambiguous environments.
• Proven cross-functional leadership across operations, product, and BD teams.
• Exceptional written, verbal, and presentation skills.
• Willingness and ability to travel frequently in region and internationally (~25%).
• Willingness and ability to work across multiple time zones (e.g. US HQ, Asia based colleagues, Middle East partners)
• Based in or willing to relocate to the Middle East (Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates).
• Mastery of critical business tools (Microsoft Suite – PPT, Excel, Word, LLMs, etc.)
• Experience forecasting, tracking, and managing deal cycles using Salesforce.