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Software Engineer, Applied AI

San Francisco, California, United States
Full Time On-site

Summary

Job Description

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 Requirements

  • BS/MS in Computer Science, Engineering, Machine Learning, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related technical field.
  • 2+ years of professional software development experience.
  • Strong Python programming skills.
  • Experience building, testing, deploying, and supporting production software systems.
  • Experience with AI/ML model integration, model serving infrastructure, or model lifecycle management.
  • Experience with model evaluation, benchmarking, robustness testing, interpretability, or ML observability.
  • Familiarity with APIs, distributed systems, containers, CI/CD, observability, and edge deployment environments/GPU optimization
  • Excited to learn unfamiliar technical domains


Preferred Qualifications

  • Experience with analog or digital RF signal processing
  • Experience with digital picture or video processing
  • Experience productizing machine learning models, LLM applications, computer vision systems, signal-processing systems, or autonomous/robotic systems.
  • Experience building AI agents or agentic workflows
  • Experience with drone, robotics, sensor fusion, tracking, or moving-target detection systems.
  • Contributions to open-source projects or technically significant public work.
  • Experience in aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, robotics, or other mission-critical environments is a strong plus
  • Familiarity with edge deployment, low-latency inference, hardware-constrained systems, or degraded-connectivity environments.


Why CHAOS?

  • Health Benefits: Medical, dental, and vision benefits 100% paid for by the company
  • Additional benefits: 401k (+ 50% company match up to 6% of pay), FSA, HSA, life insurance, and more
  • Our Perks: Free daily lunch, ‘No meeting Fridays’, unlimited PTO, casual dress code
  • Compensation Components: Competitive base salaries, generous pre-IPO stock option grants, relocation assistance, and (coming soon!) annual bonuses
  • Team Growth: 250 employees and counting across 5 global offices
$150k-170k

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

About Chaos Industries

Chaos Industries

Chaos Industries is one of the fastest-rising defense technology companies focused on solving modern national security challenges through advanced radar, sensing, and counter-drone systems. Founded in 2022, the company develops next-generation technologies designed to help military and national security operators detect airborne threats faster and operate more effectively in increasingly contested environments.

For job seekers, Chaos Industries offers the opportunity to work on mission-driven technology with direct real-world impact. Employees help build systems related to radar, autonomous sensing, communications, counter-UAS, and AI-enabled defense capabilities—making it an attractive destination for engineers, software developers, hardware specialists, program managers, and defense professionals who want to work at the forefront of national security innovation.

Unlike many traditional defense contractors, Chaos Industries operates with a startup-style culture focused on speed, innovation, and rapid problem-solving. The company is known for moving quickly, building advanced technology in-house, and tackling complex defense challenges with an engineering-first mindset. For professionals who want the mission focus of defense work with the pace of a high-growth technology company, Chaos offers a unique environment.

As defense spending increasingly prioritizes autonomous systems, drone defense, and advanced battlefield awareness, Chaos Industries continues to grow its team across engineering, operations, manufacturing, and mission support functions. For veterans, cleared professionals, and technology talent looking to help shape the future of defense, Chaos Industries is emerging as one of the more exciting companies to watch.

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