Design Technologist, Robot Animation , Fauna

Amazon • New York, NY

6d • Onsite

About The Position

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.

Requirements

• Experience with one or more of the following industry tools: 3D Studio Max, Maya, Photoshop, Zbrush, Substance, Unreal, Blender, etc
• 3+ years of professional experience in character animation, motion design, or technical animation
• Demonstrated ability to create expressive, personality-driven motion (demo reel required)
• Scripting ability in Python or equivalent for tooling, pipeline integration, and procedural animation
• Experience working within technical constraints (real-time engines, joint/physics limits, or hardware platforms)

Nice To Haves

• Experience with motion capture: directing sessions, cleaning data, retargeting to non-human characters
• Experience animating for stylized characters (robots, creatures, mascots)
• Familiarity with real-time animation systems (state machines, blend trees, procedural layers)
• Experience with robotics, physical characters, or animatronics
• Background in film, games, or themed entertainment where animation drives character personality

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 all angles

Benefits

• 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
• parental leave
• sign-on payments
• restricted stock units (RSUs)

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: No Education Listed