On SITE Technical Animator Position in NYC - Fauna Robotics

IMPORTANT:
This is a full-time position ON-SITE in New York City

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon Company

The Amazon job title equivalent for this is: ‘Design Technologist’

We are seeking a Design Technologist to define the expressive motion vocabulary that makes our robot feel alive: how it gestures when speaking, how it shows curiosity, excitement, hesitation, and calm. You will work with motion capture, hand animation, and procedural techniques to build a library of movements that bring our robots to life in real time.

This role sits at the intersection of character animation and robotics. You need strong animation instincts — timing, weight, personality — and enough technical fluency to work within the constraints of physical robots that must work in the real world.

• Author expressive robot animations that articulate the robot’s core personality: locomotion styles, conversational gesture, emotional reactions, interactive behaviors
• Partner closely with HRI researchers and robotics engineers to understand what the robot can physically do and what interactions need to feel like
• Work with motion capture to create base animations, then adapt and refine them for our robot’s form factor and joint constraints
• Develop tools and workflows (Python, Blender/Maya scripting) to accelerate animation authoring and integrate with the robot’s behavior pipeline
• Test animations on real hardware and iterate based on how they read in person, from all angles

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.

- Experience with one or more of the following industry tools:
Maya, 3D Studio Max, Blender, Photoshop, Zbrush, Substance, Unreal, Unity 3D, etc

- 3+ years of professional experience in character animation, motion design, or technical animation

• Demonstrated ability to create expressive, personality-driven character animation (demo reel required)
• Scripting ability in Python or equivalent for tooling, pipeline integration, and procedural animation
• Experience working within technical constraints (real-time engines, joint/physics limits, or hardware platforms)

- Experience with motion capture: directing sessions, cleaning data, retargeting to non-human characters

• Experience animating for stylized characters (robots, creatures, mascots)
• Familiarity with real-time animation systems (state machines, blend trees, procedural layers)
• Experience with robotics, physical characters, or animatronics
• Background in film, games, or themed entertainment where animation drives character personality

USA, NY, New York -  -  USD annually