This San Francisco Startup Is Hiring Humans to Walk Robot Dogs for $20 an Hour. No Experience Required.

Dimensional is using human walkers to teach robots to navigate city streets. Some overheating may be expected. By Jonathan Small | edited by Dan Bova | Oct 30, 2026 Peering out your car window in San Francisco can yield some interesting sights, like a human walking a robot dog. AI startup Dimensional recently posted the robot dog walking gig to a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook, according to The New York Times. Shifts run four to six hours, and walkers have to be comfortable carrying the roughly 33-pound “dog” back to the office if it gives out mid-walk (aka its equipment overheats). Dimensional is building an open-source operating system that lets AI agents control robots, so they can take on manual labor like hauling heavy boxes or working construction sites. “It’s honestly barbaric that humans are still doing these physical tasks,” Stash Pomichter, Dimensional’s 26-year-old founder, told the Times. But the pups need to learn to navigate a city first, which is where the human walkers come in. They steer the dogs while cameras and sensors record the walk. The hardware isn’t proprietary: Dimensional owns more than 100 robot dogs, and the ones on the street are $2,000 models from Chinese maker Unitree. For now, Pomichter admits, AI agents are “still very bad at controlling hardware.” It’s unclear if they work for treats. Peering out your car window in San Francisco can yield some interesting sights, like a human walking a robot dog. AI startup Dimensional recently posted the robot dog walking gig to a Bay Area jobs group on Facebook, according to The New York Times. Shifts run four to six hours, and walkers have to be comfortable carrying the roughly 33-pound “dog” back to the office if it gives out mid-walk (aka its equipment overheats). Dimensional is building an open-source operating system that lets AI agents control robots, so they can take on manual labor like hauling heavy boxes or working construction sites. “It’s honestly barbaric that humans are still doing these physical tasks,” Stash Pomichter, Dimensional’s 26-year-old founder, told the Times. But the pups need to learn to navigate a city first, which is where the human walkers come in. They steer the dogs while cameras and sensors record the walk. The hardware isn’t proprietary: Dimensional owns more than 100 robot dogs, and the ones on the street are $2,000 models from Chinese maker Unitree. For now, Pomichter admits, AI agents are “still very bad at controlling hardware.” It’s unclear if they work for treats.