Software Engineer, Applied AI

Shepherdinsurance

San Francisco (CA)

On-site

USD 120,000 - 150,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Premium Healthcare

Unlimited PTO

Daily lunches, dinners, and snacks

Professional Development

401(k) Plan

Dog-friendly office

Job summary

A technology-driven insurance firm is looking for a Software Engineer focused on Applied AI to build intelligent systems for underwriting and pricing. Candidates should have strong backend engineering experience, familiarity with AI products, and at least 5 years in software development. Benefits include premium healthcare, unlimited PTO, and professional development opportunities. The role emphasizes transforming risk evaluation using AI while working with a diverse tech stack including Node.js, React, and GraphQL.

Qualifications

At least 5+ years of working experience as a full-stack engineer.
Experience shipping AI-powered products into production.
Strong familiarity with LLMs and vector databases.

Responsibilities

Design and ship production AI systems for underwriting and pricing.
Build LLM-powered features for various applications.
Establish best practices for model reliability.

Skills

Backend engineering experience

Scalable APIs

Distributed systems

AI-powered products

Cloud infrastructure

Product mindset

Tools

Node.js

Postgres

Typescript

GraphQL

React

Next.js

Job description

What We Do

Shepherd 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 decisions
Smarter, more accurate pricing
Better risk outcomes

With 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 Investors

To date, Shepherd has raised over $20M from leading investors, including:

Spark Capital
Costanoa Ventures
Y Combinator
Susa Ventures
Intact Ventures
And several others

Our Team

We're a team of technologists and insurance enthusiasts, bridging the two worlds together. Check out our 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
Experience integrating AI systems into user‑facing or workflow‑driven applications
Comfort with cloud infrastructure and deploying AI workloads at scale
A product mindset and the ability to translate ambiguous business problems into concrete AI systems
You have at least 5+ years of working experience (preferably as a full‑stack engineer) with a track record of delivering high‑impact products

Bonus Points

Experience building AI agents or multi‑step reasoning systems
Background in applied machine learning beyond generative AI
Experience with pricing systems, financial infrastructure, or risk modeling
Interest in transforming legacy industries with modern AI systems

Why This Role Matters

Insurance 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 Stack

Frontend