Applied AI Engineer

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. Founded in 2022, CHAOS Industries has raised $1 billion in funding from leading investors, including 8VC, Accel, and Valor Equity Partners, and is headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and London.

About the role

CHAOS is seeking a highly motivated, mission-oriented Applied AI Engineer to develop, integrate, and deploy AI/ML-powered capabilities across our product lines. You will collaborate with data scientists, software engineers, product teams, and mission stakeholders to conduct advanced AI research and transform it into reliable, real-world software. The role focuses on defense applications where 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 independently, learning unfamiliar technical domains quickly, working across 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 hypotheses, 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, model serving, monitoring, lifecycle management, data processing, and system integration.
• Create rapid prototypes with mission and product teams and iterate toward production-ready implementations.
• Contribute to AI system reliability through 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.

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.

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.
• Familiarity with edge deployment, low-latency inference, hardware-constrained systems, or degraded-connectivity environments.

Schedule

• Must work on-site at least 2 days per week from our San Francisco office; 2–4 days per week preferred.
• Travel: 10-20%, mostly domestic.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, and vision benefits 100% paid for by the company.
• 401k with 50% company match up to 6% of pay.
• FSA and HSA options.
• Life insurance.
• Free daily lunch.
• ‘No meeting Fridays’.
• Unlimited PTO.
• Casual dress code.
• Competitive base salaries and generous pre-IPO stock option grants.
• Relocation assistance.
• Annual bonuses (coming soon).

Pay

The stated compensation range reflects only the targeted base compensation range and excludes additional earnings such as bonus, equity, and benefits. The salary range for this role is $150k-170k, based on a range of compensation factors, inclusive of base salary only. Actual salary offer may vary based on work experience, education, training, critical skills, and business considerations.