About the role
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 CHAOS is seeking a highly motivated, mission-oriented Applied AI Engineer to help develop, integrate, and deploy AI/ML-powered capabilities across our product lines. In this role, you will work closely with other data scientists, software engineers, product teams, and mission stakeholders to conduct advanced AI research and turn them into reliable, real-world software. The work will focus especially on defense applications where the systems must perform with extreme accuracy under constrained, adversarial, and operationally complex conditions. We are looking for someone with strong data science and software engineering fundamentals, a record of technical excellence, and demonstrated experience applying AI/ML techniques to real products. Experience in aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, robotics, RF systems, or other highly regulated or mission-driven environments is a strong plus. You should be comfortable operating with independence, learning unfamiliar technical domains quickly, working across disparate teams, and moving prototypes toward production with limited oversight.
Responsibilities Build applied AI systems across CHAOS product lines, including model integration, inference services, evaluation pipelines, and production-facing AI capabilities Perform research and build products by working with product and mission teams to research, collect data, verify hypothesis and create robust, testable, maintainable, and deployable models Evaluate and improve model performance under real-world conditions, including adversarial GPS denied environments, low-power or edge deployments, and degraded or noisy inputs Develop production-quality software for data pipelines for acquisition, model serving, monitoring, lifecycle management, data processing, and system integration. Create rapid prototypes with mission and product teams, other relevant stakeholders and iterate toward production-ready implementations. Contribute to AI system reliability, by conducting testing, benchmarking, observability, interpretability, failure analysis, and performance optimization. Learn quickly from existing codebases, documentation, research artifacts, and domain experts, then use that knowledge to drive execution. Manage time effectively across meetings, technical discovery, implementation, experimentation, and production support. Travel and Location Travel: 10-20% , mostly domestic. Location: Must work on-site at least 2 days per week from our San Francisco office; 2–4 days per week preferred . Minimum