Human Factors Engineer; HFE) Lead

At MITRE, your passion fuels work that impacts our nation and improves lives. This is where your skills strengthen national security, cybersecurity, health, transportation, and citizen services. We’re a nonprofit engineering, applied research, and advanced technology organization working in the public interest. With objectivity and integrity at our core, we lead federally funded research and development centers for U.S. government agencies – collaborating with industry and academia to deliver integrated, high-impact solutions that advance our nation’s health, security, and prosperity.

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MITRE’s Human-Systems Integration (HSI) and User Experience (UX) department is seeking a Lead Human Factors Engineer (HFE) who is passionate about designing and developing user-centered software solutions to address our sponsors' unique challenges. In this role, you will collaborate with multidisciplinary teams of engineers, designers, researchers, and stakeholders to frame complex problems, understand mission needs, and translate user insights into intuitive, scalable, and effective solutions.

You will engage directly with sponsors and stakeholders through workshops, design reviews, and iterative feedback sessions to ensure solutions align with user needs and mission objectives.

The successful candidate will be expected to:

• Lead human-centered design efforts from user research and early concept development through interaction design, prototyping, usability evaluation, and iterative refinement of software and system solutions.

• Leverage AI-assisted design tools and human-centered methods to generate, evaluate, and refine interface and system design concepts, ensuring solutions align with user needs, usability standards, and safety requirements.

• Elicit, analyze, and translate user, operational, and system requirements into human factors design inputs, ensuring alignment with systems engineering processes, usability goals, and safety-critical performance needs.

• Provide technical guidance to small multidisciplinary teams, including other Human-Centered/Human Factors Engineers, UX Designers, and Front-End UX developers.

• Collaborate closely with HCE/HFEs, UX Designers, researchers, project leaders, and sponsors, leveraging leading practices towards solution impact.

• Advocate for the end-user, ensuring user-centered design principles are consistently applied throughout the solution path.

• Develop and maintain design systems and user interface guidelines, generating research and initiative proposals.

• Mentor early career team members, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

• Typically requires a minimum of 8 years of related experience with a Bachelor’s degree or 6 years and a Master’s degree; or a PhD with 3 years’ experience; or equivalent combination of related education and work experience.

• Experience with user research methods and usability testing, including facilitating interviews, focus groups, usability testing sessions, requirements gathering, and conducting heuristic assessments.

• Experience in working with design software such as Figma, Miro, Sketch, Axure RP, Balsamiq, Lucidchart, Adobe XD, or similar tools.

• Strong interpersonal skills, coupled with excellent verbal and written communication abilities.

• Demonstrated ability to share work findings with government sponsors or senior leaders.

• Demonstrated experience leading technical efforts and technically diverse teams.

• Must have an…