Principal Product Designer, Robot Animation and Character, Fauna

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

About the team
Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is building capable, safe, and genuinely delightful robots for everyday life. Our goal is simple: make robots people actually want to live and interact with in everyday human spaces.
We believe that future won’t arrive until building for robotics becomes far more accessible. Today, too much effort is spent reinventing the fundamentals. We’re changing that by developing tightly integrated hardware and software systems that make it faster, safer, and more intuitive to create real-world robotic products.
Our work spans the full stack: mechanical design, control systems, dynamic modeling, and intelligent software. The focus is not just functionality, but experience. We’re building robots that feel responsive, expressive, and genuinely useful.
At Fauna, you’ll work at the frontier of this space, helping define how robots move, manipulate, and interact with people in natural environments. It’s an opportunity to solve hard problems across hardware and software with a team focused on making robotics accessible and joyful to build.
If you care about making robotics real for everyone and building systems that are as delightful as they are capable, we’re interested in hearing from you.
- 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
- 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

Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.

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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