Product Strategy & Operations Sr. Lead, Advanced Programs (R6510)

What You'll Do:

Partner with Capture Leads and business leaders to develop proposal strategies, win themes, discriminators, customer-focused value propositions, and compelling proposal narratives. 
• Lead cross-functional proposal-related efforts spanning Business Development, Engineering, Program Management, Customer Engagement, Finance, Contracts, and other key functions.
• Translate customer mission needs, operational requirements, acquisition strategy, evaluation criteria, and technical constraints into compliant and persuasive proposal content.
• Establish and manage integrated proposal plans, schedules, compliance matrices, content plans, volume outlines, writing assignments, review cycles, production plans, and submission activities.
• Establish and maintain strong relationships with customers, partners, and internal stakeholders.
• Drive development of proposal artifacts across technical, management, cost, past performance, and executive volumes, ensuring message consistency and alignment with the capture strategy.
• Develop leadership-ready strategy presentations, pursuit-planning materials, internal decision-support products, and capture artifacts.
• Lead development of analytically rigorous responses to RFIs, RFPs, RFQs, white papers, capability statements, and other customer-facing materials.
• Facilitate and lead proposal reviews, including blue team, black hat, pink, red, gold, and executive reviews; prepare review teams; adjudicate comments; and drive corrective actions to closure.
• Monitor and help qualify relevant government and consortium opportunities through http://SAM.gov , customer distribution lists, industry channels, and consortium networks.
• Travel between Shield AI locations, partner sites, and customer locations as required.

Capture Operations:

• Track proposal and solicitation-response activity across the Advanced Programs portfolio, including milestones, owners, dependencies, reviews, risks, and key decision points.
• Develop and maintain capture trackers, reporting mechanisms, operating cadences, and dashboards that provide clear visibility into active pursuits and proposal progress.
• Support knowledge management and development of reusable capture tools, templates, content, and best practices.

Required Qualifications:

• Active secret clearance with TS/SCI eligibility.
• Bachelor’s degree.
• 12+ years’ experience in defense and 3+ years of direct proposal manager, business development operations, or capture manager experience, including large-scale defense prime proposals valued at $250M+.
• Proven ability to lead matrixed teams through complex proposal development cycles involving technical, management, cost, pricing, contracts, and executive stakeholders.
• The ability to convert customer mission needs and engineering solutions into clear, compelling proposal content and differentiated win themes.
• Demonstrated mastery of proposal compliance, customer instructions, evaluation criteria, proposal schedules, volume management, color-team reviews, production, and final delivery.
• Proven ability to influence and align cross-functional teams in a fast-moving environment.
• Exceptional PowerPoint, written communication, editing, and quality-control skills.
• Strong analytical and conceptual problem-solving skills, with the ability to structure ambiguous problems and translate complex information into actionable outputs.
• A high degree of ownership, sound judgment, humility, and bias toward action.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Active TS/SCI clearance and experience in advanced programs.
• Experience leading large defense-program captures as a prime contractor, particularly for weapons or similarly complex platforms.
• Demonstrated expertise in capture strategy, proposal strategy, customer engagement, competitive analysis, price-to-win, market analysis, and opportunity qualification.
• Experience working with non-traditional defense companies, rapid-acquisition pathways, prototyping programs, and transition-to-program-of-record strategies.