About

I am Jonathan — a UX engineer at Google DeepMind, working on the interfaces people use to operate robots.

I got here sideways. I started at Berkeley studying political economy, left to study game programming at the Art Institute in San Francisco, and spent my early career building games and interactive experiences in Unity. That turned into AR and VR work — sample code for Google's Tango platform, VR simulation for vehicle design research — and eventually into robotics, which is where the same questions get harder and more interesting.

The consistent thread is interfaces for systems that act in the physical world. A game, a VR simulation, and a teleoperated robot are all the same basic problem: a person forms an intention, and something has to translate it into motion faithfully enough that they stop noticing the translation. Robots are the version where getting it wrong has consequences.

How I work

Build the thing people can try. Coming from games, I default to making something interactive early. Arguments about how an interface should feel are usually unresolvable in the abstract and obvious within thirty seconds of holding it.

Instrument it or you are guessing. The most useful work I did on the VR research side was not the simulation — it was the tooling that captured what people actually did inside it. A demo that cannot be measured is entertainment.

Art and engineering are one job. My degree covered both, and interface work for physical systems keeps proving that the split is artificial. How something looks and how it behaves are the same decision made twice.

Outside work

I produce and appear in The Cule Kids, a podcast I make with four other people here in the Bay Area. Episodes go out on YouTube and Spotify, and most of the day-to-day lives on Instagram.

It has picked up some press along the way — both Queerty and LADbible wrote about us in May 2026.

Producing it means I spend a great many evenings deep in an Adobe Premiere Pro timeline. Editing turns out to be a good counterweight to the day job: the feedback loop is immediate and almost entirely aesthetic. A cut either lands or it does not, and no amount of sound architecture will rescue a bad one.

Get in touch

Email is best: jonathan.chien@gmail.com. I am glad to talk about human-robot interfaces, teleoperation, or moving from games into research engineering.