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Salary: USD 150,000 - 170,000 / annual
CHAOS Industries is seeking an Applied AI Engineer to develop, integrate, and deploy AI/ML-powered capabilities across its defense technology product lines. The company, founded in 2022 and backed by $1 billion in funding from investors including 8VC, Accel, and Valor Equity Partners, operates across five global offices and specializes in Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN™) technology for warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams.
In this role, you will work closely with data scientists, software engineers, product teams, and mission stakeholders to conduct advanced AI research and translate it into reliable, real-world software. The focus is on defense applications where systems must perform with extreme accuracy under constrained, adversarial, and operationally complex conditions.
Key responsibilities include:
- Building applied AI systems across CHAOS product lines, including model integration, inference services, evaluation pipelines, and production-facing AI capabilities
- Performing research and building products by working with product and mission teams to research, collect data, verify hypotheses, and create robust, testable, maintainable, and deployable models
- Evaluating and improving model performance under real-world conditions, including adversarial GPS-denied environments, low-power or edge deployments, and degraded or noisy inputs
- Developing production-quality software for data pipelines for acquisition, model serving, monitoring, lifecycle management, data processing, and system integration
- Creating rapid prototypes with mission and product teams and iterating toward production-ready implementations
- Contributing to AI system reliability through testing, benchmarking, observability, interpretability, failure analysis, and performance optimization
- Learning quickly from existing codebases, documentation, research artifacts, and domain experts to drive execution
- Managing time effectively across meetings, technical discovery, implementation, experimentation, and production support
- Traveling 10-20% as needed
The role requires on-site presence at the San Francisco office at least 2 days per week, with 2-4 days per week preferred.
REQUIREMENTS:
Minimum:
- US Citizen or Permanent Resident
- BS/MS/PhD in Computer Science, Electrical/Electronics Engineering, Data Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or related technical field, or equivalent experience
- 2-5 years of professional software development experience (exceptional fresh graduates welcome to apply)
- Very strong Python programming skills
- Experience building, testing, deploying, and supporting production software and models
- 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
- Demonstrated excitement to learn unfamiliar technical domains
Preferred:
- Experience with explainable AI (IG, counterfactuals, occlusion, etc.)
- Experience with real-time digital 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 analog or digital RF signal processing
- Experience with drones, sensor fusion, tracking, or moving-target detection systems
- Familiarity with edge deployment of in-data-path models, low-latency inference, hardware-constrained systems, or degraded-connectivity environments
- Experience in aerospace, defense, critical infrastructure, robotics, or other mission-critical environments
