Senior Manager, Composite Production

About this role

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

We're looking for a Senior Manager, Composite Production to own the full composite production organization: the engineering, maintenance, and production teams that together turn composite process into finished parts at rate. You'll lead through a management layer of shift leads and supervisors - standing up standard work and quality control that survive shift-to-shift, building a maintenance program that keeps cure and layup equipment running, and growing and training the workforce as we scale - and help take composite production from prototype builds to predictable, production-ready output, in tight partnership with Advanced Engineering.

If you're energized by building a production organization from the ground up, developing people at scale, and hands-on manufacturing leadership, you'll be in the right place - and we'd be thrilled to have you on the team!

WHAT YOU'LL DO

- Own Composite Production Performance End to End: Hold single-point accountability across engineering, maintenance, and production for quality, yield, equipment uptime, and throughput — so the three functions operate as one, unified system.

- Lead Through a Management Layer: Build and develop the shift leads and supervisors who run the floor day-to-day, and grow that leadership structure so the organization scales without diluting quality.

- Systematize Engineered Fixes into Standard Work: Turn one-off process solutions into trained, auditable standards that every technician on every shift can run — and close the loop back to engineering when a standard isn't holding.

- Own Equipment Reliability: Run a preventive maintenance program and uptime tracking for cure, layup, and trim equipment (autoclaves, ovens, presses, trim and cure systems), and prioritize maintenance and engineering resources against production schedule risk.

- Build the Workforce and Its Training Pipeline: Stand up structured training paths and certification levels - for example a station-based dojo model and skills matrices - that take a hire from no experience to certified, independent operator.

- Run Quality Control at Scale: Put control plans, SPC checks, and non-conformance and corrective-action processes into daily practice across shifts, so quality and process control scale with production rate.

- Partner with Advanced Engineering: Work continuously with the Advanced Engineering team to validate process robustness before it reaches the floor, treating each build as a shared outcome rather than a handoff at the end of engineering's work.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

- Composite Manufacturing & Organizational Leadership: Extensive experience in composite manufacturing, including leading a multi-disciplinary organization spanning manufacturing engineering, maintenance, and/or production at meaningful scale.

- Leadership Through Leads and Supervisors: You've run production through a layer of leadership rather than by directly managing every individual, and you know how to build that layer.

- Equipment Uptime & Maintenance Strategy: Demonstrated experience running maintenance and reliability for composite process equipment — autoclaves, ovens, presses, trim and cure systems.

- Scaling a Workforce Through a Ramp: You've stood up or grown a production workforce — hiring, org design, and skills development — as volume increased.

- Turning Fixes into Sustained Standard Work: You can point to an engineered process fix you converted into standardized, trained, sustained production work across a large team.

- Hands-On Composite Production Depth: Enough working knowledge of prepreg and wet layup, vacuum bagging, cure, trim, and bonding to direct engineers and audit floor execution — paired with process discipline and variability reduction across a multi-shift workforce.

- Quality & Production Systems Fluency: Comfort running control plans, SPC, and corrective-action processes at scale, and familiarity with MES / MBOM / routing structures and how floor, maintenance, and engineering data roll up into production metrics.

- Bonus: Having led a composite production organization through a prototype-to-rate ramp in aerospace, marine, or automotive; built or scaled a maintenance program for composite process equipment; worked with automation (ATL / AFP / FPL, robotic trim, CNC) and how it changes staffing and training at rate; or built a dojo-style training curriculum that took entry-level hires to certified operators.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

- Collaborative Team Player: You treat process robustness as a shared outcome with Advanced Engineering and the integration team — something built together, not inherited once engineering is done. You're credible with engineers and floor leadership alike, and you hold a technical conversation and a shift-performance conversation with equal weight.

- Creative Problem Solver: Your default reaction to a good fix isn't "problem solved" — it's "how do we make sure every shift and every technician can run this." You build durable systems where craft knowledge used to live.

- Adaptable & Agile: You're comfortable operating in ambiguity…