Dognosis Interspecies Engineer

Bangalore, India                  ·               Full time

Come build with Dognosis

WTF is Dognosis?

At Dognosis, we are working at the bleeding edge of deep-tech – interspecies brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), cognitive neuroscience, olfactory science, machine learning – to forge a human-canine partnership that will blaze a revolution in the way we practice medicine. 

Our current team is led by Akash Kulgod and Itamar Bitan and our HQ is in Electronic City, Bangalore. We are backed by deep-tech investors Boost VC and 1517 Fund, as well as the Govt of India and Telangana’s AIC/T-Hub healthtech accelerator.

Akash grew up in an extended family of 11 (yes 11) doctors in Belgaum, went to boarding school in Bangalore and then studied Cognitive Science with Highest Honors at UC Berkeley. He deployed the world’s most functional canine BCI to conduct the first pilot studies to use EEG to understand canine olfaction and biomedical detection. Akash leads R&D at Dognosis.

Itamar grew up in a small town in Israel and spent 4 years at the Israeli Army’s canine special-ops unit, as a combat-soldier and commander at the bomb detection squad. He then worked for 2 years at an Israeli startup that trained dogs to detect breast cancer and Parkinson’s from breath samples. Itamar leads Product at Dognosis.

Dognosis is focused for the next 5 years on working with dogs and AI to develop a breath-based cancer-screening test. Our product is simple – people breathe into a mask for 10 minutes, ship it to our lab, and our dogs identify breath that has cancer-marker volatile organic compounds (VOCs).

We already know dogs can detect 28+ diseases in real-time with high accuracy (Jendrny, 2021), including multiple cancers at 90+ accuracies (Guest 2004, 2021). So where are the cancer-sniffing dogs? We believe something has been missing from the kennel over the past 20 years, and that we have the key to letting the dogs out to sniff cancer at scale.

Why bother?

Everyone knows someone who passed away from cancer. Akash’s uncle passed away last month to cancer that was detected just two years ago.

Our goal is to ensure the early diagnosis of 5M+ people in India who develop cancer every year, 80% of whom are currently diagnosed too late (stage III-IV) with legacy cancer screening covering less than 1% of Indians. As early diagnosis leads to treatment that is 5-10x less expensive and 5-25x more successful, we expect to provide significant value and save lives. 

In the process, we expect to catalyze a paradigm shift in the way we relate with dogs, especially the millions of dogs on the street, by forcefully showing that dogs can be a lot more than pets or pests — they can be partners in shared health and understanding.

Ok, all this sounds kinda cool. I like dogs. But what will I do?

We are looking for exceptionally creative and consummate engineers and scientists who can build across the worlds of bits and atoms and are fluent in biological and artificial intelligences.

More specifically, we are looking to assemble a world-class engineering and science team to do what no one has done before – quantitatively decipher the dog’s sense of smell. To do this, we will use data from non-invasive brain-computer interfaces, wearable sensors, and video cameras to create a 4E-ML ‘DogOS’ model of canine olfaction. This will build upon the foundational research conducted by Akash, as well as other researchers across the globe, and will involve solving novel and challenging problems across domains of neurotechnology, electronic/mechanical design, olfactory science, embedded systems, signal processing, computational modeling, cognitive neuroscience and machine learning.  

Some things you’ll get to build at Dognosis

• Improve upon the hardware of the world’s most functional canine brain-computer interface, aka dog mind translator, getting your hands furry with EEG and fNIRS technology. Build collaborations with neurotechnologists, industrial designers, and canine professionals to solve for novel inter-species form factors and user experiences.
• Grapple with challenging problems in embedded systems, signal processing, edge machine learning, and cognitive neuroscience to derive meaningful inferences on a dog’s internal state.
• Incorporate pre-existing technology for respiration, heart-rate, and movement data, such as that from Arduinos or commercial devices, into an overarching dogOS model.
• Take on one of the most exciting ML problems – using AI to understand another species – by building pipelines and models on large amounts of multi-modal data.
• Much much more

Nice. So what do you expect from someone interested in joining the team?

We don’t care much for credentials or years of formal experience. If you have high agency, creativity and technical ability, we’d like to chat. We’re especially interested in high-caliber generalists who see past traditional domain boundaries and can work across the stack – both the physical and digital worlds.

We are very much a non-virtual company, dogs after all cannot live in the cloud. For full-time roles, we expect you to relocate to Bangalore and commute regularly (at least 3 days a week) to our lab in Electronic City. We are open to remote part-time or internship roles where you’d work on design and data analysis problems.

We are willing to pay competitive salaries as well as offer generous ESOPS. You also get to hang out with 8 dogs. If interested, please reach out to akash@dognosis.tech, with a short note on why Dognosis is interesting to you and what you’ve worked on in the past.

Please click here to apply.