Support Engineer, Technical Design

Technical Designer

The Technical Designer's main role is to aid the design team in creating, defining, and prototyping human-robot interaction scenarios. Our approach is to start with a deep understanding of the user first and remain flexible and adaptive as we receive weekly briefings from our Design Research team. In the Technical Designer role, your active participation in design meetings and production will include brainstorming scenarios, offering technical input on best approaches for prototyping, and translating designs into code.

You will be working with a small, interdisciplinary team in a design studio environment. The ideal candidate has excellent communication skills and can give critical feedback. You understand that this is a prototyping environment and that your work and code will change, need to be reworked, or built upon by others as testing of the product continues. You work well on a team and like to laugh.

You value the role of playful exploration in the overall design process and can rise to the challenge when it's time to produce results. You are fascinated with the potential for this unique and new field of parasocial interaction design and excited to join us on this adventure.

Responsibilities include:

• Create, define and prototype human-robot interaction scenarios
• Develop, structure and maintain interaction code
• Create production-ready interfaces to help artists and non-experts quickly use underlying processes
• Work with software developers to link our robot operating system to our interaction prototyping tools
• Implement interactive game logic based on project goals
• Work with design team to develop and display content and manage media assets

Below are the minimum requirements of the education, experience, knowledge, and skills required to competently perform in this position:

• College degree in Arts or Computer Science/Human-Computer-Interaction (HCI)-related field
• 5 years of professional experience in related technical field
• Derivative Touch Designer (Intermediate and Expert proficiency)
• Unity (Intermediate proficiency)
• Python
• Java (Nice to have)
• C# (Nice to have)
• Version control with Git and Tortoise SVN
• Familiarity with 3D animation pipeline preferred
• Experience and/or interest in Chinese culture preferred
• Interest in the design of playful, informal learning interventions preferred
• Good communication, presentation and problem solving skills
• Energetic, team player, multi-tasking, organized, detail-oriented, flexible, spontaneous
• Willing to travel occasionally for work