Software Engineer, Applied AI

WHAT WE DO Shepherd is an AI-native commercial insurance platform transforming how high-hazard industries get covered. 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. The infrastructure behind the AI boom — data centers, semiconductor fabs, renewable energy assets — has to be built and insured. But traditional carriers weren't built for this speed: - Complex commercial construction projects routinely wait weeks for a single quote - Legacy carriers rely on static applications and disconnected systems - Brokers chase carriers through calls, emails, and resubmissions We built Shepherd to solve that. Our AI performs the same underwriting workflows in seconds, and integrates real-time data from construction technology partners — Procore, Autodesk, OpenSpace, DroneDeploy, and others — to see risk as it actually exists, not just as it was reported on a static form. We're pursuing the most ambitious technical vision in commercial insurance: fully autonomous underwriting. We're closing in on the first fully agentic submission in the industry — email in, price out, no human intervention until the last mile. With Shepherd, safety, speed, and quality no longer trade off against one another — they compound. We're building: - Faster decisions - Smarter, more accurate pricing - Better risk outcomes for insureds who invest in safer practices We're not just modernizing insurance products. We're building the risk infrastructure for the next generation of financial services. OUR INVESTORS In March 2026, Shepherd raised a $42M Series B https://www.linkedin.com/posts/justindlevine29_today-were-announcing-our-42m-series-b-activity-7442200922291630080-z1gw?rcm=ACoAAAkOMEwBRnAAXmdnQcaOJeioCu6VCqR6Gzc&utm_medium=member_desktop&utm_source=share — bringing total funding to over $60M — led by Intact Private Capital, the investment arm of one of the largest insurers in the world. Intact is not only our lead investor but also a carrier partner, a testament to the confidence the incumbent industry has in what we're building. Our investors: - Intact Private Capital https://www.intactfc.com/about-us/intact-ventures - Spark Capital https://www.sparkcapital.com/ - Costanoa Ventures https://costanoa.vc/ - Y Combinator https://www.ycombinator.com/ - Susa Ventures https://www.susaventures.com/ - And several others OUR TEAM We're a team of technologists and insurance enthusiasts, bridging the two worlds together. Check out our About https://www.shepherdinsurance.com/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 -