Business Development Lead - Middle East

CHAOS Industries is redefining modern defense with a multi-product portfolio that gives the ultimate advantage—domain dominance. The company's products are powered by Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN™), empowering warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams to act faster, adapt rapidly, and stay ahead of evolving threats. CHAOS Industries was founded in 2022 and has raised a total of $1 billion in funding from leading investors, including 8VC, Accel, and Valor Equity Partners. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and London. For more information, please visit www.chaosinc.com. Role Overview: As Business Development Lead - Middle East, you will build on CHAOS’ current operational presence in the Gulf region and broader Middle East and play a pivotal role in identifying, pursuing and securing new business across the region through effective opportunity identification, strategic planning, customer engagement, and capture management. You will collaborate with BD leadership, engineering, and mission execution to identify regional opportunities, understand customer needs, engage users, buyers, decision-makers and influencers, and formulate winning proposals that bring new opportunities and revenue home. You will be the tip of CHAOS’ spear in the Middle East – often on the road across the Gulf region and the broader Middle East, identifying and engaging with major defense programs of relevance to CHAOS, finding emerging requirements before our competitors do, and turning customer needs into pipeline and pipeline into customer engagements. The ideal candidate is focused, resourceful and relentless in pursuit of information; equally at home in a procurement agency office, on the exhibition floor at major regional defense trade shows, or sharing a coffee with an operator at a regional exercise. This is an exciting opportunity to be among the first members of CHAOS’ rapidly growing Middle East team, dedicated to delivering highly impactful technologies to the defense, national security and critical industrial sectors of the Gulf region and broader Middle East. Responsibilities: Middle East Market and Capture Strategy • Expand CHAOS’ Middle East pipeline by identifying business opportunities and trends across regional armed forces, ministries of defence, procurement and offset authorities, and local industry– with particular focus on the UAE, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the wider Gulf region. This includes continuous opportunity monitoring through active networking on the ground. • Provide insights into market dynamics and the regional competitor landscape, which contributes to opportunity qualification, teaming determination and narrative development. • Qualify business opportunities and evaluate attractiveness and probability of win. • Partner with BD and capture leadership to develop comprehensive capture plans at the strategic (pipeline-wide) and tactical (opportunity-specific) levels that align with business priorities and growth targets. • Partner with CHAOS government affairs and legal function to ensure that compliance with US government export procedures and licensing are facilitated and adhered to. • Partner with CHAOS government affairs for effective engagement of the Washington-based diplomatic community and US security cooperation agencies. • Attend customer meetings, industry days, conferences, exercises and trade shows across the Middle East (e.g., IDEX, World Defense Show, Dubai Airshow, SOFEX), and act as CHAOS’ ambassador to the customer and the customer’s ambassador back to CHAOS. Product Roadmap Prioritization • Translate Middle East customer priorities into capability needs that inform engineering priorities. • Participate in engineering planning sessions to ensure product development efforts are aligned to customer needs. Proposal and Content Development • Serve as the Middle East lead on proposals, market research, and white papers that support capturing regional business. Physical Location • Ideally based in the UAE, with other Middle East locations (including Jordan, leveraging CHAOS’ existing operational nodes) considered. • Heavy travel (typically 50%, with flexibility for higher travel periods) to customer sites across the Gulf states, Jordan and the wider region, plus periodic trips to our Los Angeles HQ, DC and London office. Minimum Requirements: • Hunger and initiative. Fight for information, follow weak signals and relish the chase. Be the first to volunteer for a difficult opportunity, the first to find a way through ambiguity, bureaucracy and language barriers, and the first to bring opportunities home. • Education: Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field (e.g., International Relations, War Studies, Engineering, Business, Political Science) or equivalent work experience. • Defense BD experience: 5+ years working directly with Middle East armed forces, ministries of defence, procurement / offset authorities through either industry or government employment. • Procurement fluency: Strong understanding of Middle East defence procurement, regional offset and localization frameworks and of the full capture lifecycle. • Proposal track record: Significant experience supporting and writing defense proposals, market research and white papers, with demonstrated success capturing multi-million-dollar awards. • Communication and judgment: Exceptional written and verbal communication and attention to detail, with discerning strategic thinking and strong risk assessment skills. You will be communicating with stakeholders at every level, from working-level engineers to general officers, ministers and CEOs, with cultural fluency across the Gulf and wider region. Preferred Requirements: • Domain experience: Radar, RF, sensors, weapons systems, defence technology or communications. • Regional network: Established relationships across the wider Gulf region, across ministries of defence, armed forces, procurement or offset authorities and local industry. Arabic language fluency is a significant plus. • Business acumen: Understanding of how to develop business cases and their fit into the overall CHAOS growth strategy, including offset and localization considerations specific to the region. • Defense industry knowledge: Understanding of the Middle East defense industrial landscape and opportunities for effective partnering to enable sales, offsets and market entry. Why CHAOS? • Health Benefits: private medical, dental and vision benefits (for employees & dependents) will be 100% paid for by the company • Additional benefits: 5% pension match • Compensation Components: competitive base salaries, generous pre-IPO stock option grants, relocation assistance + (coming soon!) annual bonuses • Team Growth: 250 employees and counting across 5 global offices The stated compensation range reflects only the targeted base compensation range and excludes additional earnings such as bonus, equity, and benefits. If your compensation requirements fall outside of the range, we still encourage you to apply. The salary range for this role is an estimate based on a range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on (but not limited to) work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Recruiting Agencies: CHAOS Industries does not accept unsolicited resumes or outreach. Unsolicited submissions will not be reviewed or compensated. #LI-onsite