Principal UX Designer, Fauna

Fauna Robotics; New York (NY); On-site; USD 140,000 - 200,000; Full time

Job summary

Fauna Robotics is seeking a principal UX designer to define the interaction language for a home robot. You will shape the robot's personality, identity, and the north-star experience, ensuring the product feels present and trustworthy in a home environment.

You will lead the development of interaction principles, storyboard-based storytelling, and behavioral scripts, while guiding journey maps and motion studies to evaluate concepts before launch.

Qualifications

• Principal-level UX, interaction, or experience design background.
• Portfolio in embodied, conversational, character-driven, or physically interactive systems.
• Ability to define experience strategy and influence technical direction through design.
• Comfort with non-deterministic AI behavior and early product ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Shape the robot's personality and north-star experience vision.
• Define interaction principles for living with Fauna robots.
• Create storyboards, journey maps, scripts, timing studies, and concept videos.
• Direct user research in a novel product category with no standard UX patterns.

Skills

UX design leadership

Embodied interaction

Portfolio - embodied systems

Experience strategy

Job description

What the role actually is

Fauna is hiring a principal UX designer to define the interaction language for a home robot. The job is about character, trust, behavior, communication, and relationship over time, not a conventional product surface.

The role sits in a human-robot interaction team that spans reasoning, perception, audio, and expressive robotics. The designer is expected to create principles, storyboards, behavioral scripts, journey maps, motion studies, and prototypes that make robot behavior evaluable before launch.

What you would work on

• Shape the robot's personality, identity, and north-star experience vision
• Define interaction principles for how people live with and relate to Fauna robots
• Create storyboards, journey maps, scripts, timing studies, and concept videos
• Direct user research in a novel product category where standard UX patterns do not apply

What they are asking for

• Principal-level UX, interaction, or experience design background
• Portfolio work in embodied, conversational, character-driven, or physically interactive systems
• Ability to define experience strategy and influence technical direction through design
• Comfort working with non-deterministic AI behavior and early product ambiguity

Why this one is worth a look

This is a rare consumer-facing robotics UX role where the brief is explicitly emotional and behavioral. The hard question is not just "can the robot do the task?" It is "how should a robot feel present in a home without becoming uncanny, annoying, or untrustworthy?" That makes it directly aligned with robot experience design.