Why This Job is Featured on The SaaS Jobs
Applied AI has become a defining capability for modern SaaS, and this role stands out because it treats LLM-powered systems as core product infrastructure rather than a bolt-on feature. Shepherd is building a technology platform for commercial risk workflows, putting it in the growing category of vertical SaaS and fintech-adjacent products where automation, data quality, and operational decisioning are tightly coupled.
For a SaaS engineering career, the work maps to durable, transferable problems: taking ambiguous business processes and turning them into reliable software that ships, runs, and is monitored in production. The emphasis on end-to-end ownership, evaluation frameworks, and model reliability aligns with how AI features increasingly need to be built in SaaS environments, where iteration speed must coexist with auditability and measurable performance.
This role is best suited to engineers who prefer product-facing backend work and enjoy partnering across functions to define what “good” looks like before writing code. It will fit someone motivated by applied AI delivery, including deployment, observability, and integration into real workflows, rather than research-only experimentation.
The section above is editorial commentary from The SaaS Jobs, provided to help SaaS professionals understand the role in a broader industry context.
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:
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:
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
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
React & Next.js
Typescript
GraphQL w/ Apollo
Backend
Node.js
Postgres & Redis
Typescript
GraphQL APIs
Benefits
🏥 Premium Healthcare
100% contribution to top-tier health, dental, and vision
🏖️ Unlimited PTO
Flexibility to take the time off, recharge, and perform
🥗 Daily lunches, dinners, and snacks
We work together, and enjoy meals together too
🖥️ SF, NYC, or Dallas-Fort Worth Offices
Premium office spaces on both coasts with daily lunches provided
📚 Professional Development
Access to premium coaching, including leadership development
🏦 401(k) Plan
Competitive 401(k) plan offered
🐶 Dog-friendly office
Plenty of dogs to play with and make friends with in the SF office
