SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: USD 160,000 - 240,000 / annual
CHAOS Industries is a defense technology company founded in 2022 and backed by $1B in funding from top-tier investors including 8VC, Accel, and NEA. The company specializes in advanced sensing and detection solutions powered by Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN™), serving warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams.
We are seeking a Senior Guidance Software Engineer to join our R&D team in El Segundo, California. In this role, you will lead the design of guidance software for a clean-sheet airframe design and have opportunities to expand your skillset across our product families.
Key Responsibilities:
- Implement guidance and navigation software within COTS software frameworks
- Support airframe design activities
- Support system integration of software on flight hardware
- Work full-time on-site in our Los Angeles (Hawthorne) office
You will work on cutting-edge autonomous systems and unmanned platforms, collaborating with a small, highly skilled engineering team on problems at the intersection of flight dynamics, real-time embedded systems, and modern software development practices.
Minimum Requirements:
- Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, or related field
- 10+ years of professional object-oriented software development experience
- Experience designing and implementing guidance algorithms for UAS platforms using commercial autopilot frameworks (e.g., ArduPilot)
- Practical understanding of fixed-wing and rotary-wing flight dynamics
- Extensive experience developing software on microcontroller architectures (STM32 or similar) and Linux-hosted systems (Nvidia Jetson, AMD/Xilinx SoC, Microblaze)
- Experience developing real-time embedded software with hardware interfaces
- Experience integrating vendor-provided low-level drivers and firmware
- Familiarity with Agile lifecycle processes (Scrum, CI, Test-Driven Development)
- Ability to work with minimal supervision and collaborate effectively on small teams
- U.S. Person status required (access to U.S.-only data systems)
Preferred Qualifications:
- Current or previous DoD security clearance
- FAA Part 107 remote pilot certification
- Experience with EO/IR and radar sensor integration
- VHDL firmware development and AMD/Xilinx FPGA experience
- Git version control experience
- Production-level software development and deployment (DevOps, DevSecOps, CI/CD with modern toolsets)
- Full lifecycle development of high-TRL systems
- Hardware/software integration, test, and verification of high-TRL systems
