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Salary: USD 240,000 - 310,000 / annual
CHAOS Industries is a defense technology company founded in 2022 and backed by $1 billion in funding from 8VC, Accel, and Valor Equity Partners. The company develops multi-product defense systems powered by Coherent Distributed Networks (CDN), serving warfighters, commercial air operators, and border protection teams.
As Principal Autonomy Software Engineer, you will set the technical direction for the autonomy team, which builds the perception, planning, and coordination layers that enable fleets of sensors and effectors to operate as a coherent, adaptive network. You will be the go-to technical authority for the hardest autonomy problems, serving as architect, builder, and force multiplier across the organization.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own the end-to-end autonomy software architecture, including multi-sensor fusion, world-modeling, mission planning, task allocation, and real-time decision-making across distributed nodes
- Define technical strategy and roadmap for autonomy across products, driving alignment on hard trade-offs across teams
- Build and productionize autonomy software that runs reliably on resource-constrained edge hardware in the field
- Set and enforce engineering standards for code quality, testing, simulation, and the safety and predictability of autonomous behavior
- Technically lead and mentor other engineers through design reviews, pairing, and hands-on collaboration
- Translate operational needs from warfighters and operators into robust, testable autonomy requirements
- Stand up simulation, test, and evaluation pipelines that validate autonomous behavior before field deployment
- Work primarily in office and lab environments, with travel to test sites, field demonstrations, and other CHAOS offices as needed
You will partner across hardware, RF/signals, systems, and product teams to turn sensor data into decisions operators can trust. You will take principal-level ownership of upcoming autonomy programs, standing up new capabilities from prototype to fielded system and setting the standards the rest of the organization builds against.
REQUIREMENTS:
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Robotics, Aerospace/Mechanical/Electrical Engineering, or related field, or equivalent work experience
- Deep, hands-on track record designing and shipping autonomy or robotics software (perception, state estimation, planning, control, or multi-agent systems) that has run on real hardware in the field
- Expert-level proficiency in C++/Rust and Python, with strong command of software design for real-time, safety-critical, or resource-constrained systems
- Demonstrated ownership of complex systems from concept through deployment; you have previously architected something hard and been accountable for it in production
- Strong foundation in the mathematics of autonomy: probabilistic estimation, sensor fusion, optimization, and/or planning algorithms
- Hands-on experience with robotics/autonomy frameworks and tooling (e.g., ROS/ROS2, real-time middleware, simulation environments, or bespoke middleware)
- Comfort working with real-world sensor data (EO/IR, RADAR, RF, LiDAR, GPS/INS) and the messiness of live systems
- Proven ability to lead technically in cross-functional collaborative environments, setting direction, mentoring engineers, and driving cross-team decisions without formal authority
- Must be a U.S. Person (citizen or lawful permanent resident)
PREFERRED:
- Master's or PhD in a relevant technical field
- Experience in defense, aerospace, or another mission-critical domain with high reliability requirements
- Depth in multi-agent coordination, swarming, or distributed autonomy
- Experience deploying ML or autonomy stacks to embedded, GPU-accelerated, or edge-compute hardware
- Active U.S. security clearance
