Principal Product Designer — Robot Animation & Character

Amazon; New York (NY); On-site; USD 163,000 - 285,000; Full time

Job summary

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is seeking a Principal Product Designer to animate our robots and define their personality and expressive motion. You will craft performances from concept through ship, working with engineers, researchers, and hardware teams to land character on real robots.

You will lead blocking, timing refinement, and on-robot testing, shaping how the robot greets, reacts, and stabilizes in real environments.

Qualifications

• 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.

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

Skills

12+ years experience

Character animation reel

Animation craft mastery

Concept through finished animation

Real production constraints

Motion capture experience

Tools

Motion capture

Job description

Fauna Robotics, an Amazon company, is seeking a Principal Product Designer to animate our robots and define their personality and expressive motion. You will craft performances from concept through ship, working with engineers, researchers, and hardware teams to land character on real robots.

You will lead blocking, timing refinement, and on-robot testing, shaping how the robot greets, reacts, and stabilizes in real environments.