Applied AI Engineer

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)