Principal UX Designer , Fauna

Amazon • New York, NY

1d • $180,300 - $244,000 • Onsite

About The Position

Fauna Robotics is building capable, safe, and delightful robots for everyday life. We are hiring a Principal UX Designer to define what it feels like to live with a Fauna robot: how it earns trust, communicates intent, expresses character, and becomes a valued presence in someone’s home. You will shape the robot’s interaction vocabulary alongside researchers, scientists, and engineers. You will create the principles and artifacts that guide how the entire team designs and builds interactions. And you will personally drive key design work from concept through production as the product moves toward launch. Our process is iterative and demo-led: build fast, evaluate honestly, and let each round of feedback sharpen the next. The right candidate thinks in terms of character, emotion, and behavior. They’re comfortable working across physical expression, conversational interaction, and end-to-end experience journeys. They’ve designed systems that evolve over time and build relationships with people. And they’re excited about the opportunity to define what it means for robots to belong in our lives.

Requirements

• 10+ years of professional experience in UX design, interaction design, or experience design
• Portfolio demonstrating work on character-driven, embodied, conversational, or physically interactive systems
• Experience defining experience strategy and interaction frameworks for novel product categories
• Demonstrated ability to work across disciplines and influence technical direction through design
• Experience creating and communicating design vision through narrative artifacts (storyboards, journey maps, concept videos, behavioral prototypes)

Nice To Haves

• Experience designing for physically embodied systems: robots, smart home devices, or physical computing
• Background in conversational or voice-first interaction design (voice assistants, dialogue systems, AI companions)
• Experience with character design, animation direction, or personality-driven interaction (games, entertainment, social AI)
• Familiarity with AI/ML-powered systems and designing for non-deterministic behavior
• Experience directing user research in novel interaction domains where existing patterns don’t apply

Responsibilities

• Shape the robot’s personality and identity by defining a north-star experience vision for how people live with, interact with, and develop relationships with Fauna’s robots
• Establish interaction design principles that guide how the team approaches robot interactions
• Create the artifacts that make interaction concepts tangible and evaluable: storyboards, behavioral scripts, journey maps, interaction flows, motion/timing studies, and concept videos
• Partner with the science and engineering teams to ensure design intent is achievable within technical constraints — and push back when the constraints should change
• Direct user research that exposes our blind spots through systematic, principled exploration
• Mentor and elevate the team’s design craft by establishing critique rituals, raising the bar for interaction quality, and growing the practice as the team scales

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

What This Job Offers

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