Design Technologist, Robot Animation , Fauna

Job description

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. Key job responsibilities - 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…