Startups · AI

Software Engineer, Applied AI

Shepherd · San Francisco · On-site

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About Shepherd

The all-in-one learning co-pilot. Backed by Y Combinator.

About 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 they'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
More about this role

Yesterday's insurance wasn't built for today's risk. We see it in the data and we feel it in the field. Emerging technology can reinvent how risk is priced and managed, faster and smarter, anchored in proven expertise. First-movers will define the next era of commercial risk management, and Shepherd is building it.

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...

Read the full posting on Shepherd's site ↗

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