Manager, Flight Controls & GNC

REGENT • North Kingstown, RI

3d

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.
We're looking for a Manager, Flight Controls & GNC to lead and grow the group that decides how a Seaglider is controlled from dock to dock: floating, foiling, and flying in ground effect. Three connected areas, across every REGENT vehicle program:
Guidance and navigation: the autopilot, the layer that turns a route into heading, speed, and altitude commands, state estimation, and height above a moving sea surface.
Control laws and mode management: the control laws for each regime, the transitions between them, and the mode logic that decides which is active and when.
Sensors, inceptors, and input selection: the navigation and air-data sensor suite, pilot inceptors and throttles, and the selection and monitoring logic that decides which inputs the vehicle trusts.
You'll do this across multiple vehicle programs at once: a full-scale prototype in flight test today, and our first certified production vehicle, where the control system carries the highest design assurance level on the vehicle. You'll be in the models and on console while you build the team that owns each area. If you've developed control laws that flew, led controls engineers, and you're looking for a control problem nobody has solved yet, you’ll be in the right place!

Requirements

• Demonstrated leadership in flight controls, GNC, or an adjacent vehicle-controls discipline, with experience leading technical teams, setting direction, developing engineers, and growing teams through thoughtful hiring.
• A track record of taking control laws from development through flight. You’ve personally worked through the simulate, fly, analyze, and retune loop on a real air vehicle, including prototype first flight or flight-test campaigns, and understand what it takes to turn analysis into something you’re ready to clear for flight.
• Ownership of technical delivery. You’ve been accountable for what your team delivers and clears to flight, translating technical work into test milestones, making difficult tradeoffs, and working through both technical and team challenges along the way.
• Deep expertise in at least one of our core controls areas, with strong systems-level fluency across the others. You can set technical direction, ask the right questions, and credibly review work outside your deepest area of expertise.
• Strong hands-on controls and model-based development capability, including MATLAB/Simulink for control design, modeling, simulation, and analysis. You’re comfortable getting into the models yourself, not only reviewing the work of others.
• Experience with flight controls analysis, optimization, and system identification tools and methods. Familiarity with CONDUIT and CIFER is especially valuable given the team’s existing toolchain.
• Real-world flight test judgment. You’ve supported flight test on console and can assess data, understand vehicle behavior, and make sound technical recommendations—including when a controls change is or isn’t ready to fly.
• Collaborative Technical Leader: You bring people together around hard technical problems and create an environment where strong engineers can do their best work. You listen, challenge constructively, make decisions when needed, and work across controls, software, systems, test, and other disciplines to move the vehicle forward.
• Hands-On Leader: You stay close enough to the technical work to understand what’s happening, ask the right questions, and step in when your expertise is needed. You know when to dig into a model or flight-test result yourself and when to give your team the space to own the solution.
• Calm Under Pressure: Flight test doesn’t always go according to plan. You bring sound judgment when the data is incomplete, priorities shift, or something unexpected happens - helping the team work through the problem without sacrificing rigor or safety.
• Builder Mindset: You’re excited to build on the strong team and technical foundation already in place. You look ahead to what the controls organization will need next - developing people, strengthening how the team works, and evolving the tools, processes, and capabilities needed as REGENT moves from prototype through flight test and toward production.

Nice To Haves

• Safety-critical flight controls and certification (DO-178C, ARP4754A, DO-330)
• Model-based or formal verification
• Autocode and embedded flight software
• INS/GNSS fusion and altimetry
• Height-over-surface estimation
• VTOL or multi-regime transition control
• Handling qualities
• Hardware-in-the-loop testing
• Novel vehicle or maritime certification
• Scaling a controls function in a startup environment

Responsibilities

• Build and develop the team. Lead and develop the strong team already in place while growing it to meet what’s ahead. Identify the structure, capabilities, and additional expertise the group needs; hire thoughtfully to fill those gaps; and create clear ownership and high standards that help the team grow in both scope and impact.
• Stay hands-on where it counts. Review the control models, analyses, and generated code your team ships, and rework them when that's what the next flight calls for. This part of the job will shrink as the team grows, but note that it does not shrink to zero.
• Own the controls release train into flight test. Decide what clears to the vehicle, be on console when it flies, and turn a test day into a tuning decision before the next one.
• Carry the production control system to certifiable. Work with our certification team to define the design basis, the evidence plan, and the pathway from prototype control laws to a production system at the highest assurance level.
• Establish common controls tooling across vehicles. Shape how we do modeling, model-based verification, code generation, and qualified tools so control laws for a new vehicle start from a shared foundation rather than a blank model.
• Match rigor to criticality. Certification-grade evidence on the production path, fast iteration where flight test is the teacher, and the judgment to know which is which on a given week.
• Integrate across the vehicle. Partner with simulation, autonomy, embedded, aero, systems engineering, and test so the control system lands as one coherent contribution rather than four disconnected ones.

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: Manager
• Education Level: No Education Listed