Product Lead, Internal Tools

CHAOS Industries; El Segundo (CA); On-site; USD 167,000 - 248,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

401k

Free daily lunch

No meeting Fridays

Unlimited PTO

Casual dress code

Relocation assistance

Annual bonuses

Job summary

CHAOS Industries is seeking a Product Lead to identify high-value internal software opportunities, balance build/buy decisions, and deliver working software. You’ll prototype, code, and automate, then scale foundations for engineers across CHAOS.

This onsite role in Los Angeles requires 4+ years in product management in high-ambiguity settings and strong coding experience with modern web apps and AI tools.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in product management delivering software products or internal tools in high-ambiguity environments.
• Software engineering background with hands-on coding and web app knowledge.
• Familiar with AI development workflows and tools.

Responsibilities

• Understand workflows across multiple teams to identify internal software opportunities.
• Turn requests into clear problems, user flows, and scoped projects.
• Build prototypes, automations, and integrations using code and low-code tools.
• Partner with engineers to move solutions from prototype to production.
• Create reusable data access and integration capabilities.

Skills

Product management

Software engineering

AI development

Interviewing business teams

Tools

APIs

Low-code platforms

Job 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, Seattle, and London. For more information, please visit www.chaosinc.com .

Role Overview

Agents of CHAOS is a new internal software and AI team focused on making CHAOS faster and more effective. As Product Lead, you’ll work across business functions to identify high-value problems, decide when to build, buy, integrate, automate, or change a process, and turn the best opportunities into working software. You’ll also balance your team building software versus creating capabilities (software and enablement) for other internal teams to develop their own.

Especially early on, this is a builder role as much as a product role. You’ll prototype, write code, create automations and integrations, and use AI-assisted development tools alongside engineers—not simply scope work for others. Over time, you’ll help establish reusable foundations that enable teams across CHAOS to build and automate more effectively themselves.

Responsibilities

• Work directly with teams across Finance, HR, Recruiting, Growth, Operations, Engineering, Manufacturing, IT, and Security to understand workflows, bottlenecks, and opportunities for internal software or AI.
• Turn ambiguous requests into clear problem statements, user workflows, success measures, and appropriately scoped projects; distinguish software opportunities from process, policy, training, or vendor problems.
• Develop priorities in concert with a steerco to address quick wins, reusable platform capabilities, and longer-term internal systems while balancing impact, urgency, cost, risk, dependencies, and maintenance burden.
• Personally build working prototypes, automations, lightweight applications, and integrations using code, APIs, AI-assisted development tools, and low-code platforms; particularly early on, expect to implement meaningful portions of solutions.
• Partner closely with engineers to move solutions from prototype to production, making pragmatic decisions about architecture, data flows, permissions, maintainability, sequencing, and build-versus-buy tradeoffs.
• Create reusable capabilities for data access, permissions, integrations, agent workflows, and other common needs so each new internal tool is easier to build, deploy, and operate than the last.
• Work full-time onsite in our Los Angeles office.
• Occasional travel may be required for cross-functional collaboration with other CHAOS offices and operating locations.
• 4+ years in product management delivering software products or internal tools in high-ambiguity environments.
• A software engineering background with meaningful hands‑on coding experience and strong working knowledge of modern web applications, APIs, data models, integrations, authentication, permissions, and software architecture.
• You are equally comfortable interviewing a business team about a broken workflow and opening an IDE to test a solution.
• You have strong product judgment and focus on the underlying problem rather than the requested feature.
• You thrive in high-autonomy, ambiguous environments and can move from discovery to a working solution without waiting for perfect requirements.
• You know when to prototype quickly, when to invest in durable infrastructure, and when not to build software at all.
• You earn credibility with engineers through technical depth and with business teams through pragmatism, communication, and follow-through.
• Demonstrated ability to take ambiguous business problems from discovery through implementation and adoption, ideally across multiple functions, clients, or domains.
• Fluency with modern AI development workflows and tools such as Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, Codex, or similar, including using them to materially accelerate prototyping and software development.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience in a design‑build software consultancy, internal‑tools or enterprise‑platform team, forward‑deployed engineering organization
• Familiarity with systems such as ERP, CRM, QMS, manufacturing, or data platforms

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: 350 employees and counting across 5 global offices

$167k-248k

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.

#LI‑onsite

As set forth in CHAOS Industries’s Equal Employment Opportunity policy,we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to the Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measurethe effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categoriesis as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service‑connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three‑year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

A "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

A "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.