Staff Software Engineer, Sensing Systems
Staff software engineer on CHAOS Industries' electro-optical sensing team in El Segundo, CA, building the Python services, test harnesses, simulation/hardware-in-the-loop pipelines, and autonomous field-test systems that make long-range EO/IR sensors and radar act as one system, with deployment and live fixes on edge hardware.
- Compensation
- $211K–$290K / yr
- Location
- El Segundo, California, United States
- Work setup
- Not specified
- Seniority
- Staff
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- 8+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 8+ years professional software engineering, including owning a production system end to end
- Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Physics or related field, or equivalent experience
- Strong Python, building services and tools other engineers depend on
- Comfort with Linux, Docker, networking and CI
- Real leverage from AI coding tools (e.g. Cursor, Claude Code) while able to write, explain and debug code without them
- Grounding in the physical world: hardware, sensors, robotics, or field time with systems outside the lab
- Appetite for field work and debugging/fixing on site
- Habit of measuring rather than guessing
- Work on-site in El Segundo, CA
- Regular travel to test sites and field deployments
- U.S. Person status required
- Ability to obtain and maintain a U.S. security clearance
Nice to have
- Experience with cameras, EO/IR sensors, gimbals, radar, or video pipelines such as GStreamer or DeepStream
- Embedded Linux or edge computing, especially NVIDIA Jetson, and GPU or CUDA work
- Robotics, autonomous vehicles, drones or aerospace experience
- Hardware-in-the-loop test rigs or test automation against real hardware
- Simulation or game-engine work (Gazebo, Isaac Sim, Unreal or similar)
- Building AI agent harnesses or workflow graphs
- C++ or TypeScript
- Defense or aerospace experience, or a current U.S. security clearance
Full description
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, and London. For more information, please visit .
The Role:
We're hiring one of the first software engineers on our electro-optical team. Today that means long-range EO/IR sensors. In future it could mean sensors on mobile and airborne platforms. Wherever the sensor sits, the job is the software that makes it, and every sensor around it, act as one system.
This is a software engineering role first. You don't need to be a camera or computer vision specialist. You do need to be an excellent engineer who is curious about physical systems and understands how real sensors behave: they drift, they disagree with each other, and a field test doesn't care what the simulation said.
You'll join a small, elite team that takes its own work into the field. You'll test live, change code live, and see how it holds up on the next flight. The capabilities you build will push the frontier of what these systems can do, and few engineers anywhere get to work this close to the hardware, the mission and the result.
We're also changing how we build software. The aim is to take a feature or a new capability and develop as much of it as possible without real hardware, then push it up the chain: through simulation, through hardware in the loop, and on to full end-to-end tests in the real world. Simulation will keep improving, but real hardware will always have the final say. So we're building the harnesses and graphs that carry a capability through every one of those stages, with AI doing as much of the work as it can be trusted with. The end state is fully autonomous, end-to-end tests run against real hardware at our test sites. This is what you'll be building.
What You'll Build:
- Software that works on any sensor. Code that stays generic across many different camera heads and configurations while still hitting its performance bar, and flexes to whatever the mission and the customer demand.
- The path from desk to field. Harnesses and graphs that take a capability from first commit through simulation and hardware in the loop to a full end-to-end test, with as little manual effort as possible.
- Autonomous field testing. The system that runs complete tests against real hardware at our test sites on its own, and reports back what happened.