Socially Intelligent HRI Applied Scientist

Fauna Robotics; New York (NY); On-site; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Fauna Robotics in New York is seeking an HRI applied scientist to develop socially aware, personal, and trustworthy robot interactions. You will work on conversations, turn-taking, multimodal input/output, memory, and long-term human-robot relationships.

The role sits at the intersection of robotics, large language models, social interaction, and user-facing behavior, focusing on what a robot says, how it responds, and how it uses physical context around people.

Qualifications

• Applied science experience in HRI, AI, ML, conversational systems, or related fields.
• Strong programming ability in Python, C++, Java.
• Research record through publications, patents, or deployed applied systems.
• Comfort evaluating interactions between robots and people over time.

Responsibilities

• Build conversational systems for turn-taking, grounding, and interruption handling.
• Use multimodal robot context to shape social and behavioral responses.
• Explore feedback-driven methods such as RLHF for embodied interaction.
• Integrate verbal and non-verbal behavior into trustworthy robot experiences.

Skills

HRI experience

AI/ML background

Publications/Patents

Robot-human interaction evaluation

Tools

Python

C++

Java

Job description

Fauna Robotics in New York is seeking an HRI applied scientist to develop socially aware, personal, and trustworthy robot interactions. You will work on conversations, turn-taking, multimodal input/output, memory, and long-term human-robot relationships.

The role sits at the intersection of robotics, large language models, social interaction, and user-facing behavior, focusing on what a robot says, how it responds, and how it uses physical context around people.