CHAOS Industries
European Business Development Lead — NATO
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CHAOS Industries
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 European Business Development Lead, you will build on CHAOS' current market presence in Europe and play a pivotal role in identifying, pursuing and securing new business across European NATO frontline states—particularly in Northern and Eastern Europe—through effective opportunity identification, strategic planning, customer engagement, and capture management. This is a Europe-wide coverage role based in London, not a UK-market role. You will collaborate with growth leadership, engineering, and mission execution to identify European opportunities, understand customer needs, engage users, buyers, decision-makers, and influencers, build partnerships, and formulate winning proposals that bring new opportunities and revenue home.
You will be the tip of CHAOS' spear in Europe—often on the road, identifying and engaging with major defense programs and budget cycles of relevance to CHAOS, finding emerging requirements before our competitors do, and turning customer needs into pipeline and pipeline into customer engagements. The ideal candidate combines direct experience as a buyer/user—procurement, military service, or ministry of defense—with industry-side sales or business development experience; this dual perspective is highly valued. The ideal candidate is focused, resourceful, and relentless in pursuit of information; equally at home in a procurement agency office, a NATO conference hall, or sharing a coffee with an operator at a NATO exercise. This is an exciting opportunity to be among the first members of CHAOS' rapidly growing European team, dedicated to delivering highly impactful technologies to the defense, national security, and critical industrial sectors of European NATO members and partners.
Responsibilities:
European Market and Capture Strategy
- Deliver on CHAOS’ existing pipeline of opportunities with European customers in Northern and Eastern Europe by shaping opportunities, developing proposals, and delivering capability demonstrations alongside CHAOS’ mission team in the field with European users and buyers.
- Expand CHAOS' European pipeline by identifying and qualifying business opportunities and trends across European MoDs, militaries, procurement agencies, primes and integrators. This includes continuous opportunity monitoring through active networking on the ground and using open-source channels.
- Build and maintain strategic partnerships with local European industry players—particularly across Northern and Eastern Europe—to enable market entry, teaming, and co-development opportunities.
- Engage with NATO and multinational contracting frameworks to identify and pursue opportunities accessible through allied and coalition procurement channels.
- Provide insights into market dynamics and the European competitor landscape, which contributes to opportunity qualification, teaming determination, and narrative development.
- Partner with BD and capture leadership to develop comprehensive capture plans at the strategic (pipeline-wide) and tactical (opportunity-specific) levels that align with business priorities and growth targets.
- Partner with CHAOS government affairs and legal function to ensure that compliance with US government export procedures and licensing are facilitated and adhered to.
- Partner with CHAOS government affairs for effective engagement of the Washington-based diplomatic community and US security cooperation agencies.
- Attend customer meetings, industry days, conferences, exercises, and trade shows across Europe, and act as CHAOS' ambassador to the customer and the customer's ambassador back to CHAOS.
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Product Roadmap Prioritization
- Translate European customer priorities into capability needs that inform engineering priorities.
- Participate in engineering planning sessions to ensure product development efforts are aligned to customer needs.
Proposal and Content Development
- Serve as the European lead on proposals, market research, and white paper that supports capturing European business.
Physical Location
- Based in our London office, covering a territory spanning approximately 80% of Europe—with a specific focus on NATO frontline states in Northern and Eastern Europe.
- Heavy travel (typically 50%, with flexibility for higher travel periods) to customer sites across Europe, plus periodic trips to our Los Angeles HQ and Washington, D.C. office.
Minimum Requirements:
- Hunger and initiative. Fight for information, follow weak signals, and relish the chase. Be the first to volunteer for a difficult opportunity, the first to find a way through ambiguity, bureaucracy, and language barriers, and the first to bring opportunities home.
- Education: Bachelor's degree in a relevant field (e.g., International Relations, War Studies, Engineering, Business, Political Science) or equivalent work experience.
- Defense BD experience: 5+ years working directly with European militaries, ministries of defence, or defence industry primes through either industry or government employment. Candidates combining both buyer/user-side and industry-side experience are especially encouraged to apply.
- Procurement fluency: Strong understanding of European defence procurement and national acquisition processes, non-traditional acquisition pathways, and of the full capture lifecycle.
- Proposal track record: Significant experience supporting and writing defense proposals, market research, and white papers, with demonstrated success capturing multi-million-dollar awards.
- Communication and judgment: Exceptional written and verbal communication and attention to detail, with discerning strategic thinking and strong risk assessment skills. You will be communicating with stakeholders at every level, from working-level engineers to general officers, ministers, and CEOs.
- Domain experience: Familiarity with radar, RF, and sensor systems is strongly preferred given CHAOS' near-term focus on growing its radar and sensing business across Northern and Eastern Europe.
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Preferred Requirements:
- Weapons systems, defense technology, or communications domain experience beyond radar/RF/sensors.
- European network: Established relationships with senior defense decision-makers, procurement agencies, military services, and European industry contacts across the Nordics, Baltics, Poland, Romania, and the Netherlands. A second working language (e.g., German, Polish, Nordic, or Baltic language) is a significant plus.
- Business acumen: Understanding of how to develop business cases and their fit into the overall CHAOS growth strategy.
- Defense industry knowledge: Understanding of the European defense industrial landscape, both traditional and start-ups, and opportunities for effective partnering to enable sales and market entry.
Why CHAOS?
- Health Benefits: private medical, dental, and vision benefits (for employees & dependents) will be 100% paid for by the company.
- Additional benefits: 5% pension match.
- Compensation Components: competitive base salaries, generous pre-IPO stock option grants, relocation assistance + (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.
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