Founding Machine Learning Engineer

Founding Machine Learning Engineer LocationSan FranciscoEmployment TypeFull timeLocation TypeOn-siteDepartmentEPDEngineeringCompensationZone 1Estimated Base $180K – $220K • Offers EquityActual salaries will vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. The range(s) listed is just one component of Shepherd's total compensation package for employees. Other benefits include stock options, an unlimited paid time off policy, and 100% coverage on medical, vision and dental insurance.What We DoShepherd 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 quoteLegacy carriers rely on static applications and disconnected systemsBrokers chase carriers through calls, emails, and resubmissionsWe 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 decisionsSmarter, more accurate pricingBetter risk outcomes for insureds who invest in safer practicesWe're not just modernizing insurance products. We're building the risk infrastructure for the next generation of financial services.Our InvestorsIn March 2026, Shepherd raised a $42M Series B — 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 CapitalSpark CapitalCostanoa VenturesY CombinatorSusa VenturesAnd several othersOur TeamWe're a team of technologists and insurance enthusiasts, bridging the two worlds together. Check out our About page to learn more. The Mission: Fully Autonomous UnderwritingWe think about underwriting autonomy the same way Waymo thinks about self-driving cars. Not as a binary switch, but as a graduated progression through defined capability levels. Today, Shepherd sits at the border of L1 for our first Operational Design Domain. You will build the ML systems that carry us from L1 to L3 and beyond. Every model you ship, every feedback loop you close, and every confidence threshold you calibrate is one more autonomous mile driven.The RoleYou will be Shepherd’s first Machine Learning Engineer, embedded in the Fully Autonomous Underwriting (FAU) team. This is a high-ownership, high-ambiguity role. There is no existing ML platform to inherit, no established model registry to maintain. You will build those things. You have the opportunity to define the ML function from the ground up at a company building something genuinely new in a large, underserved marketYou will work directly with underwriters to deeply understand the domain, and translate that understanding into ML systems that get meaningfully better over time. You will own the full ML lifecycle – from data through to production – and be the connective tissue between the domain expertise that exists in the business and the systems we’re...