Product Manager, HRI (Human Robot Interaction)

Sunday Robotics • Redwood City, CA

1d • $180,000 - $250,000

About The Position

Sunday is developing personal robots designed to reduce the time people spend on repetitive tasks. The Product Manager, HRI (Human Robot Interaction) will be the first product manager dedicated to HRI and will own Memo as both a character and an interface. This includes Memo’s personality, voice, movement vocabulary, animations, lighting, sounds, and user-facing communication across the robot and app.

The role has product ownership: deciding what Memo should do and why, then working with animators, sound and voice designers, app design, behavior-stack engineers, and the consumer product team to deliver a coherent, legible, and appealing experience. The position also involves learning from beta families, translating feedback into product requirements, and defining and tracking HRI metrics.

Success in the first six months includes establishing a character bible used across teams; completing the HRI trigger set for the core user journey with owners and regression tests; creating a coherent voice, animation, and lighting experience; ensuring users can understand Memo’s actions and outcomes; and establishing briefs, review processes, and a roadmap for animation and voice into R1.

Requirements

• At least 4 years of experience in product, interaction design, or character/experience design for products people talk to, live with, or play with.
• Experience in a relevant area such as consumer robots, voice assistants, games, animated characters, toys, smart home, or wearables.
• Fluency in character and personality design, including how point of view, movement style, and voice work together to create a recognizable character.
• Experience working across animation, sound, and UI to create a coherent experience and maintain consistency across surfaces.
• Enough technical grounding to work with engineers on what a robot can physically and computationally express and to make tradeoffs between ideal and feasible.
• Strong user research instincts, including observing how people interpret products and addressing misunderstandings.
• Comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage company and ability to create an initial character bible.

Nice To Haves

• A design background and portfolio showing how the candidate has shaped how something looks, moves, sounds, or talks.
• Robotics or physical product HRI experience.
• Game or film character animation direction experience.
• Voice or conversational design experience.
• Experience with text-to-speech (TTS) and motion-audio synchronization.

Responsibilities

• Develop Memo’s character bible, including personality, point of view, voice, preferences, and behavior under stress.
• Own the HRI roadmap across robot motion and gestures, audio and voice, lighting, and app state and notifications.
• Define and maintain the HRI trigger set, specifying user-facing responses across the robot and app for each robot state and event.
• Lead animation as a product area by setting animator briefs, running reviews, and ensuring animations are legible, marketable, and delightful.
• Own Memo’s voice and sound, including voice characteristics, synchronization with motion, conversational tone, and the experience of voice interactions and playback at home.
• Design Memo’s interactions with people, children, and pets, including greetings, waiting, asking for help, task completion, and interruption, in partnership with the Trust & Safety PM on stop conditions and recovery.
• Observe beta families using Memo, gather HRI feedback from dogfooding and betas, and translate findings into requirements.
• Partner with behavior-stack and animation-pipeline engineers on system capabilities and advocate for tools to review and test animations.
• Define and track HRI metrics, including intent legibility in user testing, unprompted positive mentions from beta families, voice and animation satisfaction, and response coverage across triggers.

What This Job Offers

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