Applied AI Engineer at Shepherd Insurance

Shepherd is an AI-native commercial insurance platform transforming how high-hazard industries get covered. The infrastructure behind the AI boom (data centers, semiconductor fabs, renewable energy assets) has to be built and insured, but traditional carriers were not built for this speed.

Just announced $42M Series B, bringing total funding to over $60M, led by Intact Private Capital.

Position: Software Engineer, Applied AI

Posted: February 24, 2026

The company is pursuing fully autonomous underwriting, including the first fully agentic submission in the industry.

Core Responsibilities

Design and deploy LLM-powered features for underwriting and pricing

Build production AI infrastructure for model serving and monitoring

Develop AI agents and retrieval-augmented systems that extract structured insights from unstructured insurance data

Develop autonomous reasoning systems

Establish prompt engineering and evaluation best practices

Own features end-to-end from concept to production

Required Qualifications

5+ years backend engineering experience

Proven track record shipping AI products to production

Familiarity with LLMs, RAG architectures, embeddings, vector databases

Cloud infrastructure and AI deployment at scale

Product mindset translating business problems into systems

Bonus Skills

AI agent and multi-step reasoning experience

Applied machine learning beyond generative AI

Pricing systems or risk modeling background

Tech Stack: Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Redis, React/Next.js, GraphQL

Salary: $170,000 - $220,000 annually plus equity

Benefits: Premium healthcare (100% covered), unlimited PTO, daily meals, professional development, 401(k), dog-friendly SF office.

Location: San Francisco, CA (5 days/week onsite required)