Sarama | On-site (San Francisco, CA) | Full Time | Must have a dog | [email protected]
Fullstack Hardware Engineer: Build smart collar hardware stack - PCBs, 3D printing, battery-efficient firmware. We have prototypes; need you to own hardware so we focus on distribution.
Need: consumer product experience, 3D printing, firmware skills. Mostly C.
Canine Language Specialist: Ground AI models in real dog behavior. Design training protocols, collect data, teach dogs structured communication (buttons/vocals).
Need: dog cognition experience, AAC systems, scientific mindset.
Company: Decoding dog communication via smart collars using audio/motion/behavior data to understand what dogs are saying.
Apply: Email work samples, subject "{Dog's name} says {something}," explain what interspecies communication means to you.
Sarama | Canine Language Specialist | On-site (San Francisco, CA) | Full Time | Must have a dog | [email protected]
Company: We’re building smart collars and devices to decode dog communication—using audio, motion, and behavior data. Our goal is to understand what our dogs are trying to say and rethink the worlds of training, healthcare, and companionship as we uncover their language. We've trained models for dog vocalizations and movement patterns, and now we’re integrating behavior and intent.
Role: You’ll work closely with our engineering team to help ground our models in real-world behavior. From structured training sessions to experimental communication techniques (e.g. dog buttons, symbolic vocalization training), your work will directly shape how our devices interpret canine communication. You'll guide the design of training protocols, data collection, and help teach dogs how to speak using structured methods.
You:
+ Experience in dog cognition, vocalization, and training techniques.
+ Familiar with AAC devices or button-based communication systems.
+ Scientific mindset with hands-on experience.
+ Passionate about language and cross-species understanding.
+ Must have a dog (ideally one you’ve trained using vocal cues or buttons)
Apply: Send us an email with a video or write-up of your past work (bonus if it includes your dog using buttons or vocal cues) to [email protected] with subject: “{Your dog’s name} wants {something they want}.” In the body, tell us what interspecies communication means to you.
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If you refer someone to us, tell them to let us know and we'll send you a gift! (we aren't able to give a cash bonus just yet soon though)
Sarama | Hardware Aesthete | On-site (San Francisco, CA) | Full Time | Must have a dog | https://www.sarama.ai
Company: We’re building smart collars and other devices to translate dogs into our language—using audio and motion data. We want to know what our dogs want and are on a mission to rethink the entire healthcare & training industries as we better understand them. We are mostly software people and have built our own models for dogs (soon expanding to my new cats).
Role: Hardware, firmware, and software. Moving fast will be a mix of LLM, research, hacks, and rapidly typing. Build fast, no hand-holding. First product’s a warm-up. After that, it gets real.
You:
Full-stack in the real sense (hardware + firmware + software)
Fast, independent, opinionated
Move fast, care deeply
Must have a dog
Culture: Obsessed with dogs. We’re building the interface for interspecies communication. Not just “pet people”— we believe dogs are family members fully including legally (we can discuss the changes in law on our call).
Apply: Send us an email with your portfolio (or something similar) with a picture of you and your dog to [email protected] with subject “{Your dog’s name} likes {something they like}” and in the body include what this tech means to you.
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Sarama | Cultural Savant | Remote | Full Time | Must have a dog | https://www.sarama.ai
Company: We’re building smart collars and other devices to translate dogs into our language—using audio and motion data. We want to know what our dogs want and are on a mission to rethink the entire healthcare & training industries as we better understand them. We are mostly software people and have built our own models for dogs (soon expanding to my new cats).
Role: This isn’t just marketing or vibes. You’ll shape product, brand, and behavior. You know how culture moves before it moves. You understand what dogs mean to us now—and what they could mean next.
You:
Fluent in design, language, and social undercurrents
Can shape narrative, product positioning, and human-dog interaction
Unafraid to challenge Bernays view of the world
Must have a dog. You live this.
Culture: Obsessed with dogs. We’re building the interface for interspecies communication. Not just “pet people”— we believe dogs are family members fully including legally (we can discuss the changes in law on our call).
Apply: Send us an email with your portfolio (or something similar) with a picture of you and your dog to [email protected] with subject “{Your dog’s name} likes {something they like}” and in the body include how you see culture adapting.
You can set the minimum deployment to iOS 17 & then if someone has iPhone X*, 11 or SE then you can alert them to get a refund when they open the app either with a device check or total memory check. That'll set it so you remove most of the issues of older devices.
Honestly you need to annotate datasets for barks and we're building this up with our users. Otherwise it's unclear what's happening even with video (we tried to build a YouTube/Instagram scraper and it was very unreliable even with vet tech annotations).
Correct. Dogs will vocalize and use touch with one another but the buttons are exclusively (at least from what I've observed) used for communicating with people. Though dogs & cats have specific vocalizations for speaking with people. Though we're now seeing vocalizations in new species that we didn't expect such as plants[1] & turtles[2].
That's exactly right so you can expand the vocabulary of animals especially dogs with training similar to how they train dogs to press buttons. This research is much more extensive with captive dolphins and now we're seeing the same with domesticated animals.
We've been building tech to translate dog barks to something meaningful for us to understand.
A few things we observed:
1. Dogs are more communicative once they believe you are correctly responsive to their vocalizations
2. Their barks are more differentiated over time and they start to introduce new types of vocalizations or sequences of vocalizations
3. Dogs don't have a structured vocal language as it starts of slightly differentiated and mostly to get people's attention
This isn't true for other animals (based on our reading of academic papers) and a commonality we've seen in the papers: as animals have more individuals they interact with across their life especially not directly related, their vocalizations are more structured. Within family units they tend to rely more on touch, body language, and some intermittent vocalizations. Though marine mammals are very vocal given they operate within acoustic environments in the ocean and it gets dark around 100m - 200m.
Basically, as number of sustained individuals in a group goes up and the number of non-related individuals increases, vocalizations get more diverse. We see cows, pigs, goats, and other herd animals are also very vocal which is how scientists have been decoding their speech recently similar to prairie dogs.
Much of what I've written here is a super simplification but happy to get deeper into the weeds.
We're developing a vocal language between dogs & people using ML to analyze barks to decipher which ones convey meaning. We've spent the last few years understanding how to iterate on interspecies communication. We're looking for someone who deeply understands audio data and a huge plus if you've done work with non-human audio datasets.
Working on a new app design and new features to improve adding barks to our corpus.
Sarama | Flutter Engineer | REMOTE (anywhere) | Full-Time
We're developing a vocal language between dogs & people using ML to analyze barks to decipher which ones convey meaning. We've spent the last few years understanding how to iterate on interspecies communication. We're looking for someone who deeply understands audio data and a huge plus if you've done work with non-human audio datasets.
We're publicly launching our app with our new design.
We're developing a vocal language between dogs & people using ML to analyze barks to decipher which ones convey meaning. We've spent the last few years understanding how to iterate on interspecies communication. We're looking for someone who deeply understands audio data and a huge plus if you've done work with non-human audio datasets.
Our website is still being developed but we have users actively using our alpha product and are rapidly iterating on our beta release.