Mechanical Design Engineer

REGENT • North Kingstown, RI

29d • 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 Mechanical Design Engineer at REGENT, you'll design, refine, and mature the mechanical systems that make our Seagliders work — spanning structures, mechanisms, actuation, fluid handling, and vehicle-level integration. This is a hands-on design role on our Hardware Engineering team, and it exists because we're scaling from a prototype environment toward full-rate production and need dedicated design capacity to improve, troubleshoot, and harden the wide variety of mechanical systems across our platforms.
You'll own mechanical design work across Squire, Paladin, and Viceroy — taking subsystems and mechanisms from concept through CAD, analysis, prototype, and test. You'll size fasteners and joints, run the hand calculations and analyses that justify a design, build and test prototypes in the lab, and work shoulder-to-shoulder with our electrical, software, and program management teams to close integration challenges. Over time, you'll become a technical focal point for one or more areas of ownership.
Success in this role looks like becoming a trusted, go-to contributor: independently progressing designs, identifying real issues rather than just executing tasks, and helping mature key REGENT technologies like hydrofoil retraction and control surface actuation toward production. Within a year, you'll be shaping mechanical system architectures and making sound engineering decisions with limited oversight.
If you're energized by owning real mechanical hardware end-to-end — designing it, analyzing it, building it, and watching it fly — and you want to do that work at the intersection of cutting-edge innovation and real-world impact, we'd love to have you on the team.

Requirements

• Demonstrated mechanical design experience across a variety of system types — structures, mechanisms, actuation, thermal, fluid, or electromechanical.
• Strong command of machine elements and mechanisms — bearings, locks, latches, hinges, linkages, seals, pulleys, sliders — ideally having designed systems using several of them.
• Familiarity with drive and power transmission — motors, gearboxes, gear trains, belt and chain drives, and hydraulics — plus experience selecting fastening and joining schemes and sizing joints.
• Advanced CAD proficiency designing complex components and large assemblies (NX preferred, not required), with clean, well-organized models others can build on.
• A solid analysis foundation — comfortable using hand calcs and FEA to justify design choices, with sound judgment about which analysis a system actually needs.
• Practical manufacturing knowledge — machining, sheet metal, composites, welding, castings, and additive — and how each shapes design decisions, alongside materials selection and the failure modes (fatigue, corrosion, wear, buckling) that drive it.

Nice To Haves

• Structural analysis depth — experience with FEMAP or ANSYS.
• eVTOL or flight-hardware background — designing flight-worthy, human-carrying assets, and breadth across multiple mechanical disciplines rather than depth in a single specialty.

Responsibilities

• Design mechanical hardware across a range of systems — structures, mechanisms, actuation, thermal, fluid, and electromechanical — from concept through production-intent CAD and documentation.
• Justify your designs with analysis — hand calculations plus structural (FEA), kinematic (range of motion, power, torque), thermal, or fluid analysis as the system demands, including fastener sizing and tolerance stack-ups.
• Build and test prototypes in the lab — validate concepts hands-on with limited supervision, and design or improve the test rigs, benches, and fixtures that let the team iterate quickly on real data.
• Re-envision and mature existing designs — improve mechanical systems already deployed on REGENT products, strengthening reliability, weight, and manufacturability for production.
• Partner across disciplines — interface directly with electrical, software, and controls teams to solve integration challenges, and work with program management to keep projects on schedule.
• Own projects end-to-end — serve as the responsible engineer for assigned design investigations from kickoff to completion, progressing multiple concepts in parallel while tracking their trade-offs.
• Advance key REGENT technologies — contribute to core systems like hydrofoil retraction and control surface actuation, helping move them from prototype toward full-rate production.

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: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed