A San Francisco Startup Paid $20 an Hour to Walk Its Robot Dogs. Bring Your Arms.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 29, 2026 — The job paid about what a regular dog walker makes. The dogs never needed a bag, but they did sometimes need to be carried home.

Dimensional, a San Francisco startup, posted an ad this month in a Bay Area Jobs group on Facebook looking for people to walk robot dogs on outdoor routes around the city, The New York Times reported. The pay was $20 an hour, shifts ran four to six hours, and no robotics experience was required. "Start right away and get paid right after each completed shift. Paid training is included," the Oct. 5 posting said, according to Fox Business.

There was one line in the fine print. Applicants had to be comfortable "safely handling equipment weighing about 33 pounds," because the robots sometimes overheated or simply stopped, and a stalled dog had to be hauled back to the office by hand. That office sits, as it happens, in the city's Dogpatch neighborhood.

The ad has since been deleted. It drew only a couple of comments, the Times reported, including one from a mother who wrote, "My son is interested. Can start right away." He never followed through.

The walks were not about exercise. Human walkers steered the roughly $2,000 machines with a remote or phone app while cameras and sensors gathered data on the city around them. Dimensional, founded by 26-year-old Stash Pomichter, is building an open-source operating system meant to let AI agents control robots, and it has bought more than 100 robot dogs and 50 humanoid robots to work with.

The experiment's main finding was a vote of confidence in people. "What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware," Pomichter told the Times. "And humans are still needed in the loop."