AmazonPrincipal Product Designer, Robot Animation and Character, Fauna
AI in this role
Design and animate robot personalities and expressive motion vocabularies for consumer robotics.
You are an animator first, at the top of your craft. You will define the robot's personality and its expressive motion vocabulary — how it greets someone, shows curiosity, hesitates, celebrates, or settles into calm — and you will craft the performances that establish it, from first concept through what ships.
This is a hands-on animation and design role. You spend your days animating: blocking performances, refining timing, and dialing in the character. You'll work alongside Design Technologists, HRI researchers, and roboticists who own the tools, pipeline, and hardware — you bring the performance and the personality; they help you land it on a real robot. Our process is iterative and demo-led: block it out, put it on hardware, watch how it reads in the room, and let each pass sharpen the next.
Key job 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
About the team
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.
Basic 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
Preferred qualifications
- Background in feature, episodic, or games animation, or themed entertainment, where animation drives character and story
- Experience animating stylized or non-human characters — robots, creatures, mascots — where personality must come through a non-human form
- Experience with physically embodied characters: robots, animatronics, or real-time/interactive systems where motion plays out in the physical world
- Experience with motion capture: directing sessions, cleaning data, retargeting to non-human characters
- Comfort working within physical or real-time constraints (joint and timing limits, hardware platforms) without losing the performance
- Experience defining character for a new product or franchise, where no performance language exists yet
Amazon is an equal opportunity employer and does not discriminate on the basis of protected veteran status, disability, or other legally protected status.
Our inclusive culture empowers Amazonians to deliver the best results for our customers. If you have a disability and need a workplace accommodation or adjustment during the application and hiring process, including support for the interview or onboarding process, please visit https://amazon.jobs/content/en/how-we-hire/accommodations for more information. If the country/region you’re applying in isn’t listed, please contact your Recruiting Partner.
The base salary range for this position is listed below. Your Amazon package will include sign-on payments and restricted stock units (RSUs). Final compensation will be determined based on factors including experience, qualifications, and location. Amazon also offers comprehensive benefits including health insurance (medical, dental, vision, prescription, Basic Life & AD&D insurance and option for Supplemental life plans, EAP, Mental Health Support, Medical Advice Line, Flexible Spending Accounts, Adoption and Surrogacy Reimbursement coverage), 401(k) matching, paid time off, and parental leave. Learn more about our benefits at https://amazon.jobs/en/benefits.
USA, NY, New York - 162,600.00 - 284,600.00 USD annually
How we rate this
Principal Product Designer, Robot Animation and Character, Fauna at Amazon rates 0 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Little AI. AI is not part of the work.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Open the description and count.
Prepare for this job
A free preview built only from this posting: what it asks for, what you could be asked in an interview, and how to adjust your resume.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where animation was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where character design was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where robotics was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where motion design was part of your work. What did you do?
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Animation, Character Design, Robotics, and Motion Design. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them — a tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
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