Human-Robot Interaction Applied Scientist, Fauna

What the role actually is

Fauna is hiring an HRI applied scientist in New York to develop interactions that make robots feel socially aware, personal, and trustworthy. The role covers conversation, turn-taking, multimodal input and output, memory, and long-term human-robot relationships.

It sits directly at the intersection of robotics, large language models, social interaction, and user-facing behavior. The work is about what a robot says, how it responds, and how it uses physical context around people.

What you would work on

• Build conversational systems for turn-taking, grounding, and interruption handling
• Use multimodal robot context to shape social and behavioral responses
• Explore feedback-driven methods such as RLHF for embodied interaction
• Integrate verbal and non-verbal behavior into trustworthy robot experiences

What they are asking for

• Applied science experience in HRI, AI, ML, conversational systems, or related fields
• Strong programming ability in Python, C++, Java, or a similar language
• Research record through publications, patents, or deployed applied systems
• Comfort evaluating interactions between robots and people over time

Why this one is worth a look

This is one of the clearest HRI roles on the market right now. It is not just autonomy or interface work with a robot nearby; the job is explicitly about social behavior, memory, conversation, and embodied trust.