Human Factors Engineer

REGENT • North Kingstown, RI

1d • Onsite

About The Position

At REGENT, we’re on a mission to revolutionize regional transportation between coastal cities. We're not just building vehicles, we're creating a new category of transportation: the Seaglider. These groundbreaking wing-in-ground-effect craft travel just above the water’s surface, combining the speed of an airplane with the low operating costs of a boat. Capable of 180 miles at 180 mph on today's battery tech (and up to 400 miles with next-gen batteries), Seagliders will unlock fast, affordable, and sustainable coastal transit for passengers and cargo - connecting cities, islands, and communities like never before.
Backed by leading investors and powered by a team of passionate, forward-thinking engineers, builders, and operators, we’re now scaling from a breakthrough prototype to full production - and building the team to make it happen.
Role Overview
As a Human Factors Engineer, you'll develop the human side of Viceroy: the requirements, the design decisions, the mockups, and the evidence that real pilots and passengers can operate and ride in a Seaglider safely and comfortably.
This is an end-to-end engineering role. You'll derive human factors requirements from task analysis of how a crew actually flies a Seaglider — including the transitions between modes and the abnormal cases — and from how passengers board, sit, and evacuate on the water. You'll turn those requirements into cockpit and cabin layout decisions using anthropometric and workload analysis, build the physical and digital mockups the program evaluates against, run pilot-in-the-loop and cabin evaluations with representative users, and produce the analyses and evaluation results that support our certification argument with the U.S. Coast Guard. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our Mission Software team on displays and crew alerting, with Hardware Engineering on interiors and structure, with Certification on the compliance approach, and with Test Operations and the pilots who fly our prototypes today.
Success looks like a cockpit and cabin that pass evaluation with real crews before hardware is committed, human factors requirements that are baselined and traceable at PDR and verified by CDR, and a human factors practice — method, mockups, evaluation cadence — that REGENT reuses on every vehicle after Viceroy.
If you've owned the human factors of a crew station end to end, you'd rather test on a foam-core mockup this month than argue from opinion, and you want to define how an entirely new class of vehicle gets flown, we'd love to meet you.

Requirements

• Human factors engineering depth. Strong command of anthropometry, workload and situational awareness assessment, human error analysis, display and alerting design principles, and the physical ergonomics of seats, restraints, and controls.
• End-to-end crew station ownership. You've owned human factors for a complete operator workstation — cockpit, bridge, control room, or vehicle cabin — from requirements through design, mockup, evaluation, and implemented change.
• Rigorous evaluation method. Experience designing and running usability and performance evaluations with real operators, using quantitative measures (task success, time, error, SUS, NASA-TLX, or equivalent), and translating results into design decisions that stuck.
• Requirements discipline. You write verifiable, traceable human factors requirements and know how human factors evidence is structured in a regulated environment — aerospace, defense, maritime, automotive, or medical.
• Hands-on mockup capability. You've built and iterated physical mockups (foam-core, wood, 3D-printed, bucks) and used digital human modeling or interactive display prototypes, and you know which fidelity to reach for.
• Cross-functional influence. You've changed structural, software, and avionics decisions without owning those teams, and you can tell an experienced pilot their preferred layout tested poorly — with data.
• Comfort as the first in function. You've stood up a practice from little or nothing before, or you clearly want to.

Nice To Haves

• Operator's advocate. You believe the pilot and the passenger are the customer of every cockpit and cabin decision, and you bring evidence to that argument — not preference.
• Builder, not commentator. You'd rather run a rough evaluation on a foam-core mockup this month than a perfect one on flight hardware next year, and your recommendations become changed hardware, not slide decks.
• Comfortable without a precedent. Neither flight deck nor bridge standards fit a seaglider cleanly. You find that energizing, and you know how to reason from fundamentals when the standard doesn't exist yet.
• Present for the work. Test windows drive the calendar here — early mornings, the occasional weekend, and time in the mockup bay and on or beside the water. You expect to be there for it.

Responsibilities

• Develop cockpit and cabin human factors requirements. Derive them from crew and passenger task analyses across floating, foiling, and flying modes — including transitions, abnormal, and emergency cases — and baseline them with full traceability for PDR and CDR.
• Drive layout and interface decisions with analysis. Apply anthropometry, vision and reach envelopes, workload assessment, and human error analysis to cockpit geometry, display and control placement, alerting philosophy, seating, boarding, and egress.
• Build the mockups. Stand up low- to mid-fidelity physical cockpit and cabin mockups and digital human models; choose the fidelity that answers each question, and evolve them toward a simulator cockpit with functional displays.
• Run evaluations with real operators. Design and execute formative and summative evaluations with pilots, test crews, and representative passengers; report task performance, workload, and error findings as specific design recommendations — and see them through to implementation.
• Produce certification-grade evidence. Partner with Certification to define the human factors compliance approach under our USCG Design Basis Agreement, drawing on flight deck practice and maritime bridge ergonomics, and deliver the analyses and evaluation reports that support it.
• Integrate across disciplines. Broker trade-offs between structures, avionics, mission software, and interiors so human factors findings land as design changes, not memos.
• Build REGENT's human factors practice. Establish the methods, templates, and evaluation protocols that scale to our next programs.

Benefits

• Competitive compensation including a robust equity incentive plan.
• Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance - we cover 100% of your premiums.
• 401(k) with company matching, so you can plan for the future.
• Generous flexible time off, paid parental leave, and company-wide holiday breaks.
• Relocation packages available for those moving to join our team.
• Daily, free catered lunches
• Learning & professional development opportunities

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed