Founding ML Engineer: Build Autonomous Underwriting AI

Shepherd Insurance Agency; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 180,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Shepherd Insurance Agency is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Fully Autonomous Underwriting (FAU) team. You will own the ML lifecycle end-to-end and build the platform from the ground up, partnering with underwriters to scale AI‑driven underwriting in a large, underserved market.

You will design and ship ML systems in production, implement feedback loops, and develop confidence scoring to determine autonomy levels. Expect a highly autonomous role in a fast‑moving business context.

Qualifications

• 4+ years of industry experience shipping ML systems end-to-end, including deployment platforms (e.g., AWS SageMaker).
• Experience fine-tuning LLMs, with RLHF, DPO, or LoRA.
• Deep Python proficiency and ML frameworks (PyTorch, HuggingFace, TensorFlow).
• Production LLM experience: prompt engineering, outputs, and cost/latency trade-offs.
• Ability to work with limited labeled data and synthetic data generation.
• Strong evaluation instincts: define 'better' before building.
• Excellent collaboration with non-technical underwriters.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and ship ML systems powering autonomous underwriting in production.
• Build feedback loops turning human underwriter behavior into training signals.
• Develop confidence scoring and evaluation frameworks for autonomy thresholds.
• Work with large language models to create auditable, improvable workflows.
• Partner with underwriters to extract domain knowledge and validate outputs.
• Contribute observability, monitoring, and guardrail infra for safe scaling.

Skills

End-to-end ML systems

Collaboration with underwriters

Evaluation instincts

Ambiguity tolerance

Model evaluation frameworks

Production ML lifecycle

Education

MS/PhD in quantitative field

Tools

SageMaker

PyTorch

HuggingFace

TensorFlow

OpenAI Gym

Job description

Shepherd Insurance Agency is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join the Fully Autonomous Underwriting (FAU) team. You will own the ML lifecycle end-to-end and build the platform from the ground up, partnering with underwriters to scale AI‑driven underwriting in a large, underserved market.

You will design and ship ML systems in production, implement feedback loops, and develop confidence scoring to determine autonomy levels. Expect a highly autonomous role in a fast‑moving business context.