Fauna Robotics is building capable, safe, and delightful robots for everyday life. We are hiring a Principal Product Designer to animate our robots and build a consistent character. This is the person who decides what our robot feels like as a sidekick in someone's home - and the person who animates it to get there.
You are an animator first, at the top of your craft. You will define the robot's personality and its expressive motion vocabulary - how it greets someone, shows curiosity, hesitates, celebrates, or settles into calm - and you will craft the performances that establish it, from first concept through what ships.
This is a hands-on animation and design role. You spend your days animating: blocking performances, refining timing, and dialing in the character. You'll work alongside Design Technologists, HRI researchers, and roboticists who own the tools, pipeline, and hardware - you bring the performance and the personality; they help you land it on a real robot. Our process is iterative and demo-led: block it out, put it on hardware, watch how it reads in the room, and let each pass sharpen the next.
Key job responsibilities
- Craft the robot's key performances - from concept and blocking through final motion - setting the character and the quality bar in the animation itself
- Build the expressive motion vocabulary: locomotion styles, conversational gesture, emotional reactions, idle behavior, and the small moments that make a character feel alive
- Define the robot's personality - its point of view, emotional range, and behavioral signature - and keep it consistent across every animation as the product evolves
- Iterate on real hardware: test how a performance reads in person, from every angle, and refine timing and weight until it lands
- Work with motion capture and reference where it helps, then adapt and refine performances for the robot's form factor and joint constraints
- Capture character intent in animation-ready artifacts - performance references, motion studies, behavioral scripts, and concept videos - so the rest of the team can build on it
BASIC QUALIFICATIONS
- 12+ years of professional experience in character animation
- A body of work - reel required - that demonstrates authorship of character and personality through motion: timing, weight, appeal, and performance
- Mastery of animation craft across a range of characters and emotional registers, from broad performance to subtle, quiet moments
- Experience carrying a character from concept through finished, polished animation
- Ability to work within real production or technical constraints without losing the performance
PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS
- Background in feature, episodic, or games animation, or themed entertainment, where animation drives character and story
- Experience animating stylized or non-human characters - robots, creatures, mascots - where personality must come through a non-human form
- Experience with physically embodied characters: robots, animatronics, or real-time/interactive systems where motion plays out in the physical world
- Experience with motion capture: directing sessions, cleaning data, retargeting to non-human characters
- Comfort working within physical or real-time constraints (joint and timing limits, hardware platforms) without losing the performance
- Experience defining character for a new product or franchise, where no performance language exists yet
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, NY, New York - 162,600.00 - 284,600.00 USD annually
