Design Technologist, Robot Animation, Fauna

What the role actually is

Fauna is hiring a design technologist to shape how a home robot moves, gestures, and expresses intent in real time. The work combines character animation, motion capture, procedural animation, and enough robotics fluency to respect physical limits.

This is a design role for robot behavior, not a screen role. The person will help translate personality, conversational moments, and interaction states into motion that can run on an embodied system.

• Author locomotion, gesture, reaction, and conversational animation for a physical robot
• Adapt motion capture and hand animation to the robot's form factor and joint constraints
• Build tooling and workflows in Python, Blender, Maya, or related pipelines
• Partner with HRI researchers and robotics engineers on expressive behavior

• Strong animation instincts around timing, weight, character, and emotional readability
• Technical fluency with animation tooling, scripting, or real-time behavior pipelines
• Comfort designing for physical constraints rather than only digital playback
• Ability to collaborate across HRI, design, and robotics engineering

This is one of the clearer signals that Fauna is treating motion as product design. If the robot is meant to live near people, the difference between useful and unsettling will depend on small choices in timing, gesture, and attention.