Director of Data Management and Operations

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

Data is foundational to how CHAOS develops, tests, and improves complex sensing systems. As the company scales, we need a data operating model that makes information consistent, trusted, secure, and usable across Engineering, AI, Test, and business teams.

As Director of Data Management and Operations, you'll own the end-to-end data lifecycle: how data is defined, collected, transported, governed, transformed, secured, and delivered for analysis. You'll lead our data management and field data operations functions, partnering closely with the Foundry engineering team to ensure the platform meets company needs.

This isn't an analytics-only role. It's a technical and operational leadership role spanning data governance, data-platform coordination, and test operations. You'll build durable systems and teams while remaining close enough to field execution to understand where data quality and collection break down.

Success means teams use the same definitions, analysts can trust the datasets they receive, test data is captured and available quickly, and access to sensitive data is controlled and auditable without becoming a barrier to execution.

Responsibilities

• Establish company-wide governance for data definitions, ownership, quality, lineage, retention, and calculation change management.
• Create authoritative, documented analytical datasets and shared definitions so teams can work from consistent data and metrics.
• Work with the Foundry engineering team to ensure that data ingestion, ETL, modeling, transformation, validation, and monitoring align with stakeholder needs.
• Own permissions management and partner with Security and Compliance to implement least-privilege access, auditability, retention, and handling controls for sensitive data.
• Build a repeatable process for planning data capture at test events, including required sensor data, metadata, truth data, labels, logging, storage, and validation.
• Coordinate across teams to translate test objectives into clear data requirements and ensure collection systems are ready before testing begins.
• Establish pre-test readiness and post-test reconciliation processes so required data is captured, validated, transferred, cataloged, and available for analysis.
• Use test outcomes and data gaps to continuously improve collection methods, retention strategy, data quality controls, and the underlying data architecture.
• Build and manage teams responsible for data governance and field data operations, while establishing an effective partnership with the Foundry engineering team.
• Sustain data operations at CHAOS test sites, including contributing to test schedule strategy, extraction technology and logistics, , and data labeling.
• Create clear operating procedures, ownership, service levels, and metrics for pipeline reliability, test data capture, and data availability.
• Partner with Foundry engineering to balance immediate test and program needs with long-term investments in scalable architecture, automation, , and team capability.
• Work full-time on-site at our El Segundo, CA headquarters
• Travel to CHAOS test sites and other company locations on a regular basis.
• Support critical test events and field operations outside standard business hours when needed.

Minimum Requirements

• 10+ years of experience across data engineering, data platforms, data governance, analytics infrastructure, test data, or similarly complex technical environments, including significant team leadership.
• 3+ years of management experience, ideally with prior experience managing teams incorporating non-exempt or contract employees.
• You see data as both a technical platform and an operating discipline, not simply a reporting or analytics function.
• You can move comfortably between data engineers, radar and test teams, security stakeholders, analysts, and senior leadership.
• You build governance creating clarity and trust without unnecessary bureaucracy.
• You are willing to get close to field operations and understand the practical realities of collecting, moving, and validating data.
• You thrive in high-execution environments where requirements evolve quickly and ownership is expected.
• You combine strong technical judgment with practical prioritization and can make sound tradeoffs across platform, operations, and compliance.
• You enjoy building teams, systems, and operating rhythms from the ground up.
• Demonstrated ownership of production data pipelines from source ingestion through transformation, quality assurance, publication, and consumption.
• Strong knowledge of ETL, data modeling, metadata, lineage, data quality, observability, and modern data engineering practices.
• Strong cross-functional leadership and communication skills, with the ability to turn ambiguous needs into clear standards, systems, and operating processes.
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Information Systems, or a related technical field.

Preferred Requirements

• Experience with Palantir Foundry or a comparable enterprise data platform; deep Foundry experience is strongly preferred.
• Radar or defense systems experience
• Experience planning or supporting test events and coordinating the operational logistics required to reliably collect and transport data.
• Experience designing permissions and access-control processes in environments with significant security, compliance, audit, or data-handling requirements.
• Experience supporting data collection from physical systems, sensors, laboratories, manufacturing, or field testing.

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

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. 

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