Job description
HRI Design Lead, Companion, Product Experience
NEO is a home robot that handles chores and provides personalized assistance. As HRI Design Lead, you'll define how NEO relates to people: personality, emotional responses, and the interaction patterns that make living with a humanoid feel natural.
This is an unconventional, high-impact design role. You're designing a relationship between humans and an embodied intelligence that occupies physical space and navigates social nuance. You'll shape model behavior through prompt engineering and work directly with our AI team to translate design intent into how NEO thinks, speaks, and acts.
Job requirements
In this role, you will:
Design NEO's social character: turn-taking, attention, interruption handling, uncertainty, recovery, and boundaries, so people always understand what NEO is doing and why.
Define personality and voice: tone principles, rules of engagement, and a practical style guide that stays consistent across features and edge cases.
Enable NEO to communicate nonverbally: how NEO expresses confidence, empathy, urgency, and status through language, timing, and nonverbal signals (head angle, ear cues, state indicators).
Prototype relentlessly: scripted and interactive prototypes to converge quickly on flows, prompts, multimodal patterns, and embodied demos.
Translate capabilities into shippable experiences, balance technical constraints with a high bar for user experience excellence.
You might thrive in this role if you:
Have 3+ years designing human-AI or human-robot interactions: not just chatbots, but systems where behavior, timing, physical presence, and social dynamics matter. Voice assistants, conversational AI, robotics, gaming AI, or character animation all count.
Think in systems, not screens: you model interaction as state machines, emotional arcs, and branching behaviors rather than static wireframes.
Can prototype and experiment with your own ideas. Proficiency in Python or another scripting language is required.
Understand that embodiment changes everything. A robot in your kitchen is fundamentally different from an app on your phone, and that challenge excites you.
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