Cardog careers: remote jobs, culture and where they hire

Cardog builds a vehicle data platform for insurers, dealers, manufacturers, fleets, lenders and the public bodies that register vehicles: one API that decodes a VIN, returns the build specification, matches recall campaigns from Transport Canada and NHTSA, and prices the vehicle against live market comparables. The company's founding rule is that nothing on a Cardog response is guessed: every value names the source that produced it, and a field with no source comes back empty and says so. The platform also ships bulk feeds, an embeddable product for dealers, TypeScript and Python SDKs, and an MCP server for AI agents.

The company started in March 2025 as a VIN decoder and first launched to consumers as an AI car-buying companion on Product Hunt in June 2025, before building out the B2B platform. The decoder, called Corgi, has been open source under an ISC licence since May 2025, and the API client and vehicle identifiers published as packages (@cardog/api 1.0.0, @cardog/entities under Apache 2.0) in July 2026. Cardog Inc. was federally incorporated in Ontario on May 13, 2025. The company is named after the founder's two dogs, Misha and Simba, and its careers page describes a small team with a wide surface where what you build ships to production.

Sam Sullivan Delgobbo, Founder. Started Cardog in early 2025 in the Greater Toronto Area and incorporated Cardog Inc. federally in May 2025. Studied artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto and founded the company young, writing publicly that the idea came from buying his first car at 22 and realizing dealers had wholesale prices, auction data and market intelligence while buyers navigated cryptic listings. Launched Cardog's first consumer product on Product Hunt in June 2025 and open-sourced the Corgi VIN decoder the month after the company's first commit.

Ownership is the pitch. The careers page says every engineer carries a whole area, from the first commit to the morning it misbehaves, and each posting lists what the role owns outright: the Data Platform Engineer owns ingestion and the shape of the data, the VIN Decode Engineer owns decode accuracy, the Design Engineer owns the design language and the screens built on it, and the Founding Engineer for the dealer platform would be that product's first engineer, expected to put one dealer group live end to end in the first 90 days.

The work is unusually concrete. Role descriptions talk about deciding which source wins when a government file and a manufacturer filing disagree about the same truck, reading manufacturer filings line by line to rebuild one manufacturer's VIN patterns, and checking patterns against millions of real VINs and against what the car's own modules report. Cardog also maintains a real open-source lineage: the Corgi decoder has been public since two months after the first commit.

Three rules from the careers page describe how the team works: you own what you ship, nothing on a Cardog response is guessed (a field with no source comes back empty, a rule the company says shapes the code and the reviews), and decisions are written down in the repo where the next person can find them. The about page adds that the no-guessing rule costs the company fields, and that a short answer that is true is worth more than a full one that is not.

Each posting includes a blunt "not for you if" line: the data platform role is not for you if you want a clean warehouse and a dashboard backlog, the dealer platform role is not for you if you want a spec ("nobody here will write one for you"), and the design role is not for you if you want to hand off mockups, because here the designer is the one who merges it. As of October 2026 the site lists eight open roles across data, design, business and field work, including a Hardware Engineer building the device that reads vehicles through the diagnostic port and a Policy and Standards Lead representing Cardog in Canadian vehicle-data consultations.

Cardog publishes its process on the careers page: three conversations and no take-home. First a thirty-minute conversation on the work and your background with the person who runs hiring, then a forty-five-minute working session with the engineer who owns the area, on a real problem from it, followed by a conversation with the founders. The company says it reads every application itself and answers each one.

Applications go through a short form on each role (name, email, location, one link such as GitHub or a portfolio, a note and a resume), or by email to careers@cardog.app. Postings spell out who they want and who they do not: the data roles want people who write SQL before reaching for an ORM and treat tens of millions of rows as a normal day, the design role says portfolio matters more than years, and the VIN decode role asks for someone "obsessive about correctness, in a way that has annoyed somebody before". There is also a general "don't see your role" application.