HRI Technical Designer

As an HRI Technical Designer on the HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) team at Boston Dynamics, you will help create and maintain our evolving rapid prototyping & creative coding environment to support our ongoing HRI efforts for all of our current and future robot product lines. In this role, reporting to the Director of HRI, you will be helping our team bring to life our robots both on and off-screen (in physical reality). This is an exciting and unique position that requires a blend of 3D generalist skills, real-time system engineering (connecting modules together) and familiarity with physical computing/robotics.

Boston Dynamics is a world leader in mobile robots, tackling some of the toughest robotics challenges. For years, our awe-inspiring viral videos on YouTube have shown the world what remarkably capable robots can do. Now we are quickly becoming a recognized leader in automation solutions for industrial applications and warehouse logistics.  

The HRI team at Boston Dynamics includes 3D animators, game developers, on-screen and physical UX/UI Designers specialized in Robotics. The team works closely with Industrial Designers on prototyping robots and hardware interfaces to ensure our robots are easy to understand and simple to use.  We are the advanced design team responsible for how the robots are used as well as proposing future features that improve the overall user experience and differentiate our robots from the competition. 

All applicants should send a portfolio of work samples, web link (preferred) or pdf.

Day to day activities:

• Rapid prototyping and maintenance of evolving, real-time interactive HRI prototyping system 

• Building functional UI elements in our prototyping environment to simplify complex underpinnings

• Expanding existing projects with new real-time features

• Building and Integrating robots with conversational AI pipeline

• Developing interactive behavior library content (robot animation & sound design)

We are looking for:

• Bachelor's Degree in a related field preferred

• Minimum 3 years proven track record in creative coding environments like TouchDesigner

• Experience with prompt engineering, safe-guarding, and linking various AI and LLM models together for robust conversational interactions

• Physical computing and Python proficiency to communicate with sensor HW and robot APIs

• Basic electrical engineering experience to wire together and power experimental sensors and devices

• Collaborative ‘can do’ person who enjoys a challenge and inventing the future of robot HRI: UX/UI

• Great at communicating your ideas through demos

Nice to have:   

• Technical animation and sound design experience

• Unity development experience

• Experience building device-agnostic Shared Augmented Reality 

We are interested in every qualified candidate who is eligible to work in the United States. However, we are not able to sponsor visas for this position.