Senior Communications Systems Engineer

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 Overview
As a Communications Systems Engineer, you will own the connectivity backbone of CHAOS's fielded systems — 5G/cellular, SATCOM (e.g. Starlink), point-to-point wireless, and tactical mesh radios. You will bring rigorous systems engineering practice to the comms domain: verifiable requirements with traceability, defined architectures and interfaces, disciplined trade studies, and verification from factory test through field deployment. Your mission is to ensure every communications solution is selected, qualified, validated, and ready for field deployment.
You will also keep CHAOS ahead of the pace of commercial and tactical comms innovation, continuously scanning the landscape for emerging technologies — new radios, waveforms, multi-orbit SATCOM constellations, and software-defined networking approaches — and driving the most promising into the product baseline. This role is full-time onsite at our office in El Segundo, CA.
Responsibilities
Systems Engineering
Translate mission, customer, and business needs into verifiable, traceable system and subsystem requirements for connectivity
Develop and maintain connectivity architectures, interfaces, design descriptions, and ICDs across cellular/5G, SATCOM (LEO/MEO/GEO), point-to-point wireless, and tactical mesh networks
Perform design analysis and verification — RF link budgets, key performance parameters (EIRP, G/T, C/N₀, Eb/N₀, throughput), antenna placement and pointing, handover behavior, and regulatory compliance
Lead trade studies weighing performance, size/weight/power, cost, availability, and compliance — including forward-looking needs such as non-line-of-sight links, elevated relays, and GPS-denied synchronization
Hardware Selection & Qualification
Evaluate, select, and qualify comms hardware (cell modems, SATCOM terminals, P2P dishes, mesh radios) for field robustness and regional compatibility — verifying RF bands, regulatory suitability, and export/AT compliance before purchase or baseline, and managing regional variants in the product BOM
Collaborate with suppliers, satellite operators, and service providers to develop and integrate connectivity solutions
Integration & Test
Integrate comms equipment into factory test plans with clear pass/fail criteria, and establish pre-ship verification on representative system hardware with in-country SIMs and bands
Support system integration, troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis from lab through field deployment — driving corrective actions into the baseline; participate in technical reviews and embed with product scrums to verify baseline compatibility
Deployment & Field Support
Own the tested connectivity matrix across deployment countries (cellular bands, SATCOM legality and plans, spectrum constraints, validated fallbacks) along with configuration baselines and runbooks for all comms peripherals, in partnership with FDE, Mission, and IT