Account Director - Inflight Entertainment

Role Overview

Account Director - Inflight Entertainment at Thales, based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

Company Overview

Thales is a global aerospace and defense company with over 80,000 employees in 68 countries. Thales has been a trusted partner of the United Arab Emirates for over 50 years, providing innovative solutions in Defence, Aerospace, and Cyber & Digital. With a strong local presence and more than 500 employees across three offices in the UAE, Thales is deeply embedded within the UAE's ecosystem. Thales Emarat Technologies serves as a key industrial enabler, fostering national sovereignty, self-reliance, and innovation through localization, strategic collaboration, and exporting Made in the Emirates technologies to global markets.

Thales creates in-flight entertainment systems, avionics that control the world's largest commercial aircraft, and simulators that train the next generation of pilots for fighter jets, transporters, and search and rescue helicopters.

Role Purpose

The Account Director owns the commercial relationship with a strategic airline account and acts as the customer advocate inside Thales. The role secures sustainable and profitable growth above market by building a true long-term partnership with the customer, applying a systematic and customer-centric account management approach that maximizes mutual value. This role is critical to the future commercial performance of the inflight entertainment business in the region, carries one of the largest and most complex airline relationships in the portfolio, and converts deep customer understanding into profitable order intake and growing wallet share over the long term.

Key Responsibilities

Customer Success and Account Management

• Serve as the lead commercial point of contact for the customer account team
• Build relationships with senior executive and C-level stakeholders and strategic ecosystem partners across the region
• Develop trusted advisor relationships with key customer stakeholders and executive sponsors
• Ensure the timely and successful delivery of Thales solutions according to customer needs and objectives
• Communicate the progress of monthly and quarterly initiatives clearly to internal and external stakeholders
• Collaborate with the sales and account teams to identify and grow opportunities within the account
• Support cross-functional integrated product teams and act on issues impacting the customer experience
• Manage customer expectations, survey activity, and experience scorecards to sustain a high level of customer satisfaction
• Lead the account team to provide proactive, world-class support focused on responsiveness, quality, and speed of resolution

Commercial Negotiations and Strategy

• Own and grow the account end-to-end against the account plan, delivering order intake and margin commitments
• Lead complex commercial negotiations from opportunity through to signed contract, coordinating pricing, legal, product, and program teams to secure profitable outcomes
• Drive the shift toward digital, connectivity, and value-based services, converting recurring revenue and selling services opportunities beyond the installed hardware base
• Develop new business with the existing customer and identify areas of improvement to meet sales targets
• Forecast and track key account metrics and work with marketing to establish effective support

Customer Analysis and Consultation

• Create and maintain the account development plan, opportunity pipeline, capture plans, and accurate forecasting
• Maintain customer priority status and align internal resources accordingly
• Prepare reports and professional presentations to communicate opportunities, trends, and issues to customer teams and senior management
• Lead customer quarterly business reviews with stakeholders and executives
• Maintain inputs and updates in the Customer Relationship Management tool (Salesforce) as appropriate

Strategic Leadership

• Act as the lead commercial point of contact and decision maker on matters affecting the account, including impact on profit and loss within the defined commercial mandate
• Engage established and prospective customer stakeholders to build intelligence, drive customer success, and generate sales
• Serve as the point of escalation for the account
• Communicate the value of the full Thales Group portfolio, not only inflight entertainment, and lead the expansion of digital, connectivity, and recurring services revenue alongside the core inflight entertainment hardware base

Qualifications & Experience

• Bachelor degree in business administration, marketing, sales, engineering, or a relevant field; Master degree preferred
• Fifteen or more years of experience in sales, key account management, or commercial roles within the airline or aviation industry
• Direct, demonstrable experience with inflight entertainment, inflight connectivity, or onboard digital and passenger experience products (mandatory)
• Ten or more years establishing and implementing account plans, roadmaps, and strategy across internal and external strategies, contracts, budget, and objectives
• Ten or more years in contract management associated with issue and litigation resolution and customer complaint management
• Proven ownership of large, complex business-to-business accounts, including order intake in the tens of millions of US dollars
• Track record of selling services, software, or connected solutions, not only hardware
• Experience operating inside or selling to a major international airline with a complex, multi-stakeholder decision structure

Skills & Competencies

• Proficient with CRM (Salesforce) and the Microsoft Office suite
• Excellent communication and negotiation skills
• Self-motivated and self-directed, able to operate autonomously with a results-oriented, can-do mindset
• Able to mentor and lead an account team and manage competing priorities effectively

Additional Information

• Domestic and international travel required, up to 35 percent or more
• Preferred qualifications include an existing network within major Gulf or international carriers, background with an inflight entertainment original equipment manufacturer, airline inflight entertainment or product team, connectivity provider, or systems integrator, demonstrated experience transitioning a hardware account toward recurring services revenue, and understanding of avionics or aviation digital and connectivity technology
• Thales provides careers and mobility, enabling thousands of employees each year to develop their careers at home and abroad in existing areas of expertise or by branching into new fields