Product Manager, HRI (Human Robot Interaction)

Join Us in Building the Future of Home Robotics At Sunday, we're developing personal robots to reclaim the hours lost to repetitive tasks. We're focused on an ambitious goal to make generalized robots broadly accessible, enabling households to take back quality time. We have spent the last 18 months building a talented team, securing capital, and validating our technology. We are now seeking passionate individuals to join us in the next phase of our growth. If you are ready to apply your skills to the forefront of robotics innovation, we’d love to hear from you. Memo is the first home robot most of our users will ever live with. Everything he does — how he moves, what he says, how he sounds, what his lights mean, what the app tells you — makes an impression and builds or erodes trust. Human-robot interaction (HRI) is how we design all of that on purpose. You'll be our first product manager dedicated to HRI. You'll own Memo as a character and as an interface: his personality, voice, movement vocabulary, animations, lighting, sounds, and the user-facing communication across robot and app. You'll work with animators, sound and voice designers, app design, the behavior-stack engineers, and the consumer product team to make Memo legible, likable, and unmistakably himself. This is a role with product ownership — you decide what Memo should do and why, and work with designers, engineers, and animators to bring those actions on embodiment. What You'll Do - Own Memo's character. Turn the existing bio into a living character bible — personality, point of view, voice, what he likes, how he behaves under stress — that every team designs against. - Own the HRI roadmap across every product surface: robot motion and gestures, audio and voice, lighting, and app state and notifications. Decide what Memo communicates, when, and through which channel. - Define and maintain the HRI trigger set: for each robot state and event, specify the user-facing response across robot and app so engineering can build to it and QA can regression-test it. - Lead animation as a product area. Set briefs for animators, run reviews, and own the three objectives: legibility (a fresh-eyed user can predict what Memo's about to do), marketable moments (filmable, on-demand behaviors), and delight. - Own Memo's voice and sound: the voice itself, how it syncs with motion, conversational tone and register, and how voice interactions and playback feel in a real home. - Design how Memo interacts with people, kids, and pets — greetings, waiting, asking for help, finishing a task, being interrupted — in partnership with the Trust & Safety PM on stop conditions and recovery. - Learn from real homes. Watch beta families live with Memo, pull HRI feedback from dogfooding and betas, and turn it into requirements. - Partner with the behavior-stack and animation-pipeline engineers on what the system can express, and push for the tooling product needs to review and test animations. - Define and track HRI metrics: intent legibility in user testing, unprompted positive mentions from beta families, voice and animation satisfaction, and response coverage across triggers. What You'll Bring - 4+ years in product, interaction design, or character/experience design on products people talk to, live with, or play with — consumer robots, voice assistants, games, animated characters, toys, smart home, wearables, or similar. - Nice to have a design background and portfolio. You've shaped how something looks, moves, sounds, or talks, and can show it. You don't need to be the animator or the sound designer, but you need to direct them well. - Fluency in character and personality design: how a point of view, movement style, and voice combine into something people recognize and care about. - Experience working across animation, sound, and UI on one coherent experience, and holding the line on 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. You watch people, notice what they misread, and fix it. - Comfort with ambiguity at an early-stage company. You can write the first version of a character bible that doesn't exist yet. - Bonus: robotics or physical product HRI experience; game or film character animation direction; voice/conversational design; work with TTS and motion-audio sync. What success looks like in 6 months - A character bible for Memo exists and is used by animation, voice, app design, and engineering. - The HRI trigger set is complete for the core user journey across robot and app, with owners and regression tests. - Memo's voice, animations, and lighting read as one coherent character, and beta families say so unprompted. - A fresh-eyed user can tell what Memo is about to do, is doing, and whether it worked. - Animation and voice have clear briefs, a review process, and a roadmap into R1. At Sunday Robotics, we’re building technology shaped by real people — curious, creative, and diverse. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and consider all qualified applicants regardless of race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status. Even if you don’t meet every single requirement, we encourage you to apply. Studies show that women and underrepresented groups often hold back unless they meet 100% of the criteria — we don’t want that to be the reason we miss out on great talent.