Software Engineer, Applied AI

What We Do

Shepherd is a technology‑driven Managing General Underwriter (MGU) transforming commercial Property & Casualty insurance for high‑hazard industries. Our mission is to make risk frictionless for the builders and operators shaping the physical world — protecting progress from concept through construction and into decades of operation.

We’re building the fastest, smartest commercial risk platform, where underwriting expertise, data, and automation work together to deliver:

• Faster decisions
• Smarter, more accurate pricing
• Better risk outcomes

With Shepherd, safety, speed, and quality no longer trade off against one another — they compound. We’re not just modernizing insurance products. We’re building the risk infrastructure for the next generation of financial services, where technology, underwriting, and partnerships operate in harmony to support the world’s most important industries — and the progress they make possible.

Our Investors

To date, Shepherd has raised over $20M from leading investors, including:

• Spark Capital
• Costanoa Ventures
• Y Combinator
• Susa Ventures
• Intact Ventures
• And several others

Our Team

We're a team of technologists and insurance enthusiasts, bridging the two worlds together. Check out our About page to learn more.

The Role

We are hiring a Software Engineer focused on Applied AI to build intelligent systems that directly power our underwriting and pricing engine. This role sits at the intersection of product engineering, AI infrastructure, and real‑world insurance workflows.

You will design and ship production AI systems that meaningfully improve how we evaluate risk, price policies, and operate our business.

What You’ll Do

• Partner with product, engineering, underwriting, and data teams to identify high‑leverage AI opportunities
• Design, build, and deploy LLM‑powered features across underwriting, pricing, and internal tooling
• Develop AI agents and retrieval‑augmented systems that extract structured insights from unstructured insurance data
• Build production‑grade AI infrastructure for model serving, inference, evaluation, and monitoring
• Create internal AI tools that enable underwriters and operators to move faster with higher quality decisions
• Establish best practices for prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and model reliability
• Own AI features end‑to‑end from ideation to production

What We’re Looking For

• Strong backend engineering experience building scalable APIs and distributed systems
• Hands‑on experience shipping AI‑powered products into production
• Familiarity with LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector databases
• Experience integrating AI systems into user‑facing or workflow‑driven applications
• Comfort with cloud infrastructure and deploying AI workloads at scale
• A product mindset and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into concrete AI systems
• You have at least 5+ years of working experience (preferably as a full‑stack engineer) with a track record of delivering high‑impact products

Bonus Points

• Experience building AI agents or multi‑step reasoning systems
• Background in applied machine learning beyond generative AI
• Experience with pricing systems, financial infrastructure, or risk modeling
• Interest in transforming legacy industries with modern AI systems

Why This Role Matters

Insurance is one of the largest industries in the world, yet much of underwriting and pricing remains manual and fragmented. At Shepherd, AI is not a side project – it is core to how we build durable competitive advantage.

You will help define how applied AI transforms risk evaluation in high‑hazard industries and shape the future of AI‑native insurance infrastructure.

Our Tech Stack

Frontend

• React & Next.js
• Typescript
• GraphQL w/ Apollo

Backend

• Node.js
• Postgres & Redis
• Typescript
• GraphQL APIs

Benefits

Premium Healthcare
100% contribution to top‑tier health, dental, and vision

️ Unlimited PTO
Flexibility to take the time off, recharge, and perform

Daily lunches, dinners, and snacks
We work together, and enjoy meals together too

️ SF, NYC, or Dallas‑Fort Worth Offices
Premium office spaces on both coasts with daily lunches provided

Professional Development
Access to premium coaching, including leadership development

401(k) Plan
Competitive 401(k) plan offered

Dog‑friendly office
Plenty of dogs to play with and make friends with in the SF office