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.

Our people tackle the toughest technical challenges, supported by competitive benefits, meaningful career development, and a culture of innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Choose MITRE for a career with purpose — and help shape the future.

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 individual will be responsible for all aspects of Human Systems Integration for Air Force cyber acquisition program offices.

Responsibilities include:

• Human-System Integration requirements definition
• Mission task and workflow analysis
• Collaborating with agile software development teams on user interface design
• Prototyping of user interface designs
• Evaluation of user interfaces for requirements compliance
• Analysis of hardware configurations for human use
• Development of usability and workload testing requirements
• Execution of usability and workload assessments during user evaluations, operational tests and other user assessment events
• Evaluation of documentation to include training materials, style guides and user/maintainer guides
• Evaluation of Air Force Research Laboratory, industry or other FFRDC capabilities to meet the needs of cyber users
• Mission engineering to enhance low Technology Readiness Level capabilities to meet user needs
• 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.

• Minimum of 8 years of relevant work experience, with a proven track record of researching, designing, developing, and prototyping system applications using user-centered design principles.
• Bachelor’s degree in Human Factors Engineering, Cognitive Engineering, Psychology, Human-Computer Interaction, Interaction Design, UX Design, UX Research, or a related field.
• 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…