Software Engineer, Applied AI

What We DoShepherd 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 decisionsSmarter, more accurate pricingBetter risk outcomesWith 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 InvestorsTo date, Shepherd has raised over $20M from leading investors, including:Spark CapitalCostanoa VenturesY CombinatorSusa VenturesIntact VenturesAnd several othersOur TeamWe're a team of technologists and insurance enthusiasts, bridging the two worlds together. Check out our About page to learn more. The RoleWe 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 DoPartner with product, engineering, underwriting, and data teams to identify high-leverage AI opportunitiesDesign, build, and deploy LLM-powered features across underwriting, pricing, and internal toolingDevelop AI agents and retrieval-augmented systems that extract structured insights from unstructured insurance dataBuild production-grade AI infrastructure for model serving, inference, evaluation, and monitoringCreate internal AI tools that enable underwriters and operators to move faster with higher quality decisionsEstablish best practices for prompt engineering, evaluation frameworks, and model reliabilityOwn AI features end-to-end from ideation to productionWhat We’re Looking ForStrong backend engineering experience building scalable APIs and distributed systemsHands-on experience shipping AI-powered products into productionFamiliarity with LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, and vector databasesExperience integrating AI systems into user-facing or workflow-driven applicationsComfort with cloud infrastructure and deploying AI workloads at scaleA product mindset and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into concrete AI systemsBonus PointsExperience building AI agents or multi-step reasoning systemsBackground in applied machine learning beyond generative AIExperience with pricing systems, financial infrastructure, or risk modelingInterest in transforming legacy industries with modern AI systemsWhy This Role MattersInsurance 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 StackFrontendReact & Next.jsTypescriptGraphQL w/ ApolloBackendNode.jsPostgres & RedisTypescriptGraphQL APIsBenefits 🏥 Premium Healthcare100% contribution to top-tier health, dental, and vision🏖️ Unlimited PTOFlexibility to take the time off, recharge, and perform🥗 Daily lunches, dinners, and snacksWe work together, and enjoy meals together too🖥️ SF, NYC, or Dallas-Fort Worth OfficesPremium office spaces on both coasts with daily lunches provided📚 Professional DevelopmentAccess to premium coac ... (truncated, view full listing at source)