# Director of Business Development, Middle East

**Company**: Shield AI
**Location**: Abu Dhabi
**Work arrangement**: onsite
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: full-time
**Category**: Sales
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/1797f337-f646-4fd1-8f31-a8163213eaec?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_44b0e889-15a

## Description

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.

## Skills

### Required
- Business development
- Defense
- National security
- Aerospace
- Government relations
- Complex program management
- Autonomy
- UAVs
- ISR
- Advanced sensing technologies
- Negotiation
- Relationship-building
- Stakeholder management
- Cross-functional leadership
- Microsoft Suite
- Salesforce

### Nice to have
- Arabic language fluency
- US citizenship
- Existing US or allied security clearance
- Prior military service or operational leadership experience in the Middle East
- UAV operations
- Mission autonomy
- AI-enabled C2 systems

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Source: [Apply at jobs.lever.co](https://jobs.lever.co/shieldai/1797f337-f646-4fd1-8f31-a8163213eaec?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)