Software Engineer, Applied AI
At a glance
Mid-level AI Engineering role at CHAOS Industries. San Francisco · $140,000–$193,000 base.
aimlroles summary, based on the employer's posting.
What you'll do
- Build AI features for the product lines, covering model connections, inference services, evaluation workflows and production use
- Work with product and mission teams to gather data, test research ideas and turn findings into dependable models
- Check model performance with noisy inputs, GPS-denied conditions and limited-power or edge deployments
- Develop software for data pipelines, model serving, monitoring, lifecycle management and system integration
- Prototype with stakeholders, then test, benchmark and refine systems as they move toward production
What you bring
- A bachelor's or master's degree in computer science, engineering or another listed technical field
- At least two years of professional software development and experience supporting production software
- Strong Python skills and hands-on work integrating AI/ML models, serving them or managing their lifecycle
- Experience assessing model quality through evaluation, benchmarking, robustness checks, interpretability or ML monitoring
Who this fits
This role suits a mid-level engineer who can work independently, learn unfamiliar technical areas quickly and take prototypes toward production. You must work from the San Francisco office at least two days each week, with two to four preferred, and expect mostly domestic travel of ten to twenty percent.
From the employer
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.
CHAOS Industries was founded in 2022 and has raised a total of $1 billion in funding from leading investors, including 8VC, Accel, and Valor Equity Partners. The company is headquartered in Los Angeles, with offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and London. For more information, please visit www.chaosinc.com.
Role OverviewCHAOS 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
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.