Business Development Lead - Europe in London

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.

Role Overview

As Business Development Lead – Europe, you will build on CHAOS’ current market presence in Europe and play a pivotal role in identifying, pursuing, and securing new business across Europe through effective opportunity identification, strategic planning, customer engagement, and capture management. You will collaborate with BD leadership, engineering, and mission execution to identify European opportunities, understand customer needs, engage users, buyers, decision‑makers, and influencers, 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 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.

Responsibilities

• European Market and Capture Strategy
  • Expand CHAOS’ European pipeline by identifying 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.
  • Provide insights into market dynamics and the European competitor landscape, which contributes to opportunity qualification, teaming determination and narrative development.
  • Qualify business opportunities and evaluate attractiveness and probability of win.
  • 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 compliance with US government export procedures and licensing.
  • 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.
  • 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 & Travel
  • Ideally based in the London office but remote from the European mainland also possible.
  • 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.

Qualifications

• 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.
• Defence BD experience. 5 + years working directly with European militaries, ministries of defence or defence primes through either industry or government employment.
• 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 defence 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.

Preferred Requirements

• Domain experience. Radar, RF, sensors, weapons systems, defence technology or communications.
• European network. Established relationships across European MoDs, militaries or defence primes. 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 defence 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.
• 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 only of base salary. As set forth in CHAOS Industries’ Equal Employment Opportunity policy, we do not discriminate on the basis of any protected group status under any applicable law.