Product Manager, HRI (Human Robot Interaction)

Location: Redwood City, CA, United States; Onsite

Salary: $180K–$250K per year

Company

hirify.global is building personal home robots designed to automate repetitive household tasks and make generalized robotics broadly accessible.

What you will do

• Own Memo’s character and create a character bible covering personality, point of view, voice, preferences, and behavior.
• Own the HRI roadmap across robot motion, gestures, audio, voice, lighting, app states, and notifications.
• Define HRI triggers and user-facing responses across the robot and app so engineering can implement them and QA can regression-test them.
• Lead animation as a product area, including briefs, reviews, legibility, marketable behaviors, and delight.
• Own Memo’s voice and sound experience, including conversational tone, motion synchronization, and playback in the home.
• Design interactions with people, children, and pets; study beta homes and dogfooding; partner with engineering on system capabilities, tooling, and HRI metrics.

Requirements

• 4+ years in product, interaction design, or character/experience design for consumer robots, voice assistants, games, animated characters, toys, smart home products, wearables, or similar products.
• Fluency in character and personality design, including the relationship between point of view, movement style, and voice.
• Experience coordinating animation, sound, and UI as one coherent experience and maintaining consistency across surfaces.
• Technical grounding sufficient to work with engineers on what a robot can physically and computationally express and to make feasibility tradeoffs.
• Strong user research instincts and the ability to identify and resolve user misinterpretation.
• Comfort with ambiguity in an early-stage company and with creating an initial character bible from scratch.

Nice to have

• Design background and portfolio demonstrating work that shaped how something looks, moves, sounds, or talks.
• Robotics or physical-product HRI experience.
• Game or film character animation direction.
• Voice or conversational design experience.
• Experience with TTS and motion-audio synchronization.

Culture & Benefits

• Early-stage environment focused on building personal home robotics and validating technology with real households.
• Work with a diverse, creative, and curious group building technology around real people.
• Equal opportunity employer considering qualified applicants regardless of protected characteristics.
• Applicants are encouraged to apply even if they do not meet every listed requirement.

Hiring process

• Applicants should be able to demonstrate relevant work through a design background or portfolio where applicable.