Shield AI is seeking a Manager, Global Real Estate to lead portfolio strategy, site selection, transactions, lease administration, occupancy planning, and portfolio analytics across a rapidly growing global footprint. This role will create the disciplined portfolio-management capability required to align physical infrastructure with business growth, workforce demand, financial stewardship, and operational readiness.
This is a hands-on role for a commercially astute leader who can move from long-range portfolio strategy to transaction execution and detailed lease or occupancy analysis. The successful candidate will build a reliable global portfolio fact base, lead external advisors, translate ambiguous business demand into clear real estate recommendations, and guide decisions that create long-term financial and operational commitments.
What you'll do:
- Own and maintain the global real estate portfolio strategy, including location, capacity, tenure, timing, and scenario recommendations.
- Partner with business leaders, Px, Finance, Manufacturing, Engineering, Security, EH&S, and Facilities Operations to understand growth plans, workforce demand, operating requirements, and risk.
- Translate business scenarios into multi-year portfolio plans, decision points, options, dependencies, and financial implications.
- Identify opportunities to expand, renew, consolidate, relocate, or exit space before constraints become business-critical.
- Lead site selection, market evaluation, option development, and real estate transaction strategy for new and existing locations.
- Direct brokers, market advisors, landlords, and other external partners through clear scopes, timelines, deliverables, and performance expectations.
- Structure and negotiate leases, renewals, expansions, contractions, assignments, subleases, and exits in partnership with Legal, Finance, Procurement, and executive approvers.
- Coordinate business cases, due diligence, approvals, negotiation positions, and transaction documentation while maintaining a clear audit trail of decisions and commitments.
- Establish and maintain a single authoritative inventory of sites, leases, owned assets, critical dates, obligations, rights, options, and landlord responsibilities.
- Implement disciplined lease administration, critical-date management, notice processes, obligation tracking, and escalation controls.
- Partner with Finance and Legal to validate occupancy costs, rent and operating-expense obligations, forecasts, accruals, and transaction assumptions.
- Drive timely resolution of landlord, lease, and occupancy issues while preserving clear ownership between Real Estate and Facilities Operations.
- Establish common occupancy-planning methods, demand inputs, capacity assumptions, space standards, and scenario models.
- Maintain a current view of capacity, utilization, vacancy, constraints, lease events, cost, and portfolio risk across the global footprint.
- Develop location and space scenarios that balance business speed, employee experience, operational requirements, flexibility, cost, and risk.
- Create concise portfolio dashboards and decision materials for monthly reviews, annual planning, and major site or transaction approvals.
- Serve as the principal real estate advisor to the Global Facilities Leader and a trusted business partner to senior stakeholders.
- Coordinate with Capital Delivery to translate an approved transaction into a funded project, while preserving Capital Delivery ownership from authorization through occupancy.
- Engage Facilities Operations, EH&S, Security, IT, Manufacturing, and other stakeholders early enough that operating and compliance requirements inform site and transaction decisions.
- Contribute the portfolio fact base, real estate risks, and decision materials required for enterprise governance without assuming ownership of the broader Facilities PMO.
PORTFOLIO STRATEGY AND DEMAND PLANNING
SITE SELECTION, TRANSACTIONS, AND BROKER MANAGEMENT
LEASE ADMINISTRATION AND PORTFOLIO CONTROLS
OCCUPANCY, SPACE PLANNING, AND PORTFOLIO ANALYTICS
LIFECYCLE INTEGRATION AND EXECUTIVE ADVISORY
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in corporate real estate, business, finance, economics, planning, facilities, project management, or a related field.
- 6+ years of progressive experience in corporate real estate, portfolio strategy, transactions, occupancy planning, workplace strategy, lease administration, or a comparable function.
- Demonstrated experience supporting a multi-site portfolio and translating business demand into real estate strategies, options, and executive recommendations.
- Practical experience with site selection, lease transactions, broker management, commercial negotiations, due diligence, or lease administration.
- Strong business and financial acumen, including occupancy-cost analysis, scenario modeling, business cases, budgeting, forecasting, and trade-off evaluation.
- Ability to synthesize incomplete and sometimes conflicting inputs into concise, fact-based recommendations and decision materials.
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and coordinate Finance, Legal, Px, Procurement, Facilities, Capital, Security, EH&S, and business partners without relying on formal authority.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, sound judgment, high discretion, and the ability to operate independently in a fast-changing environment.
Preferred qualifications:
- Experience in aerospace, defense, advanced manufacturing, technology, or another high-growth and regulated environment.
- Experience with international portfolios, multi-country transactions, or global real estate business partnering.
- Experience supporting manufacturing, engineering, hangar, laboratory, classified, SCIF, or other technically complex environments.
- Familiarity with IWMS, lease-administration, occupancy-planning, mapping, financial-modeling, and business-intelligence tools.
- Real estate, finance, project-management, workplace, or related professional credential.
- Experience building a new real estate capability, leading external advisors, or developing analysts and cross-functional workstreams.
Skills Required
- Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in corporate real estate, business, finance, economics, planning, facilities, project management, or related field
- 6+ years progressive experience in corporate real estate, portfolio strategy, transactions, occupancy planning, workplace strategy, lease administration, or comparable function
- Experience supporting a multi-site portfolio and translating business demand into real estate strategies and executive recommendations
- Practical experience with site selection, lease transactions, broker management, commercial negotiations, due diligence, or lease administration
- Strong business and financial acumen including occupancy-cost analysis, scenario modeling, business cases, budgeting, and forecasting
- Ability to synthesize incomplete and conflicting inputs into concise, fact-based recommendations and decision materials
- Proven ability to influence senior stakeholders and coordinate cross-functional partners without formal authority
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, sound judgment, high discretion, and ability to operate independently in a fast-changing environment
- Experience in aerospace, defense, advanced manufacturing, technology, or other high-growth and regulated environment
- Experience with international portfolios, multi-country transactions, or global real estate business partnering
- Experience supporting manufacturing, engineering, hangar, laboratory, classified, SCIF, or other technically complex environments
- Familiarity with IWMS, lease-administration, occupancy-planning, mapping, financial-modeling, and business-intelligence tools
- Real estate, finance, project-management, workplace, or related professional credential
- Experience building a new real estate capability, leading external advisors, or developing analysts and cross-functional workstreams
Shield AI Compensation & Benefits Highlights
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Healthcare Strength — Healthcare coverage includes medical, dental, vision, and mental-health support, with company materials describing excellent coverage. Feedback suggests these offerings are comprehensive and consistently highlighted across official and third-party benefit lists.
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Equity Value & Accessibility — Equity is granted to all full-time hires, with RSU structures and tools like Carta Tax intended to improve understanding and tax timing. Feedback suggests this broad-based ownership approach is a notable component of total rewards.
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Parental & Family Support — Benefits include paid parental leave, fertility support, childcare benefits, family medical leave, and onsite resources such as a Mother's Room. Feedback suggests the family-oriented offerings are more expansive than basic coverage.
Shield AI Insights
What We Do
At Shield AI, you won't wait years to see your work reach the field. You'll build hardware and software that operates in the real world right now, in the hands of the people who depend on it. Hivemind, our AI pilot, has been flying since 2018. It has flown more than 30 platforms, including an F-16, and it now sits under a U.S. Air Force production contract for Collaborative Combat Aircraft. When you write code or shape a system here, you contribute to technology with a proven flight record and a clear production future. V-BAT flies intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions with an operational record that stretches from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific. It delivers eyes where they matter most, in the most demanding conditions on earth. The teams behind it watch their work get tested where the stakes are real. X-BAT takes its first flight this year. It's an AI-piloted fighter that needs no runway, built to operate where traditional aircraft can't. Join now and you help shape a program at its earliest, most formative stage. That's the kind of ground-floor work that defines a career. Do the most impactful work of your life, on problems that matter. Autonomy at this level asks a lot of you. You'll take on problems in perception, planning, and control that few teams anywhere are equipped to solve. You'll work across disciplines, from aerospace and robotics to machine learning and systems engineering, alongside people who hold themselves to an exacting standard and expect the same from you. Our mission is clear: protect service members and civilians with intelligent systems. That purpose runs through every decision, every design review, and every deployment. It's why the work here carries a weight you can feel. Ready to join our mission? Explore our open roles and find where you fit.
Why Work With Us
Founded in 2015 by a former Navy SEAL, Shield AI builds AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft. Veterans aren't an afterthought here, they're at every level. It's why the work carries weight: AI pilots and uncrewed aircraft flying real missions, from Ukraine to the Indo-Pacific, protecting service members and civilians.
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