Careers at Openrouter

About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the leading AI routing and infrastructure layer that enterprises use to access, manage, and optimize the best large language models across providers—without lock-in, capacity constraints, or unnecessary cost. We power the most advanced AI teams in the world by giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve. As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads. About the Role The Provider Ecosystem team owns the supply side of OpenRouter: every model, endpoint, and provider the router can send a request to. That means hundreds of providers, thousands of endpoints, and millions of requests a day, in a model landscape that changes every week. You’ll be at the front of the industry. Labs and inference providers want to reach OpenRouter’s users, so this team gets early access to novel inference offerings, often through exclusive and stealth launches, and gets them live on day zero. This is a hands-on leadership role reporting to the VPE. You’ll grow the team, stay deep in the code, and be OpenRouter’s technical face to the labs and providers we partner with. What You'll Do Lead the team: hire and grow strong engineers, set the roadmap, stay hands-on in code reviews and incidents, and advocate for the team with leadership. Core Provider: own provider adapters, the endpoint lifecycle, and routing. Be the technical counterpart for top providers, run day-zero and stealth launches, and work with GTM, BD, and legal to get providers from signed NDA to live in weeks, not months. Multi-Modal: lead the expansion beyond text into image, video, audio, and embeddings, plus realtime and batch inference. Benchmarks: own evals and inference quality, and turn that data into routing decisions and direct feedback that makes providers better. What We're Looking For 4+ years of engineering management experience, including at least one environment where you built or scaled a team during a period of rapid growth. Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, API design, and LLM inference. You understand how inference is served (streaming, tool calling, prompt caching, quantization, throughput and latency trade-offs), how provider APIs differ from each other, and what it takes to route millions of requests across hundreds of heterogeneous endpoints. Hands-on and comfortable staying that way. You write code, use AI-assisted development tools, and lead by example in a team where everyone ships. Comfortable being externally facing. You can sit across from a model lab’s engineering team, negotiate an integration, and represent OpenRouter’s technical requirements without a PM in the room. Data-driven about quality. You want benchmarks, evals, and production telemetry deciding which provider gets traffic, not vibes. Proven ability to recruit and retain strong engineers. Ideally, you’ve built teams people want to join and you bring a network of talent with you. High agency and clear communication. You don’t wait for direction, you identify what matters, make a plan, and drive it forward. You speak up when you disagree and back it with substance. Pragmatic about what a lean engineering org actually needs versus what a 500-person org would do. You optimize for speed and clarity, not process. Nice to Haves Experience at an inference provider, model lab, or GPU cloud, or building products on top of many LLM APIs at once. Experience with our stack: TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Postgres, ClickHouse, GCP, or Vercel. Background in evals, benchmarking, or routing and load-balancing systems. Experience shipping multimodal APIs (image, video, speech, embeddings) or realtime and batch inference. Experience running vendor security and compliance reviews (NDA, DPA, SOC 2) as part of a partner onboarding process. Existing user of OpenRouter, or active side projects in AI infrastructure or developer tooling. If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone who is excited to join the team.

About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the leading AI routing and infrastructure layer that enterprises use to access, manage, and optimize the best large language models across providers—without lock-in, capacity constraints, or unnecessary cost. We power the most advanced AI teams in the world by giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve. As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads. About the Role We’re hiring a Software Engineer on our Trust & Safety team to own the detection, enforcement, and review systems that keep abuse, fraud, malicious users and illegal content off the platform. Millions of LLM requests and a large volume of payments flow through OpenRouter every day, and maintaining the safety, integrity, and trust of our platform is a priority. You’ll build the systems that detect abuse and fraud, the heuristics for automated action and abuse mitigation, the tooling our reviewers act through, and the guardrails that keep us from acting on the wrong account. You will be responsible for proactive abuse-prevention architecture for a new layer of the AI stack while the abuse patterns are still being invented. The threat model changes quickly, and the systems you build have to catch novel abuse without adding friction for the legitimate developers and enterprises who use our platform. Done well, this work protects millions of daily requests, our provider relationships, and the trust that enterprises place in OpenRouter. This is a hands-on IC role with broad surface area spanning the inference path, the payments path, internal review tooling, and the data platform underneath all of it. There is little process between you and shipping, and your work has direct consequences for real users, so the bar for judgment is high. What You’ll Do Build and operate technical systems across signup, payments, and usage to detect abuse and fraud early. Own the technical enforcement pipeline end to end, from detection proposing a candidate to a human reviewing it to restrictions landing across our systems. Build the internal tools that support investigation and enforcement decision-making. This involves building case queues, evidence summaries, bulk review and enactment, and alerting mechanisms to trigger investigations. Ship technical solutions for content safety on the inference path: illegal content detection and reporting, the KYC systems or external intelligence sources to allow us to more efficiently and proactively detect and stop fraud and abuse. Help make abuse uneconomical by building systems, tools, and heuristics for quick detection and scalable enforcement. Help investigate incidents directly in the data and build the analytics plane so we can quickly establish what happened, size the pattern, and separate real abuse from a false-positive cluster. Build defensible monitoring for risk, abuse spikes, and fraud, all while reducing false positives. Set the technical direction for how we prevent abuse as the platform grows and evolves, and define the patterns other engineers build against. Work with data scientists on feature exploration and training of risk and abuse ML models What We’re Looking For 4+ years building and operating production systems, ideally including work in trust & safety, fraud, payments risk, security, or anti-abuse. Proficient in React, TypeScript, Next.js, and JS runtimes. Ability to write SQL against large event datasets and reason about base rates, precision and recall, and the cost of a wrong decision. Sound judgment when working with incomplete evidence. High agency and a bias toward action; spotting problems, iterating, and shipping without waiting for tickets. AI-forward in your workflow, using coding agents often, finding interesting ways to automate your work, and holding opinions about what works and what doesn't. Comfortable in a small, fast-moving environment where boundaries between teams are intentionally fluid. Discretion and resilience, since parts of this role may involve reviewing or discussing disturbing content and handling sensitive user data. Strong written and verbal communication, able to explain incident findings, detection rules, and systems to a range of audiences. Motivated by adversarial problems, where the counterparty adapts to whatever you ship and the work keeps evolving. Nice to Haves Experience with payments fraud tooling (Stripe Radar, chargeback and dispute flows, crypto payment risk), or with identity and KYC systems. Experience with LLM-specific abuse: jailbreaks, prompt injection, key theft and resale, shared or scraped credentials, automated account farming. Experience operating large scale analytical datastores (e.g. ClickHouse, BigQuery) and observability platforms. Familiarity with the reporting and compliance obligations that come with hosted AI, including illegal content reporting and model provider policy requirements. Existing user of OpenRouter, or active side projects in AI products/infrastructure or developer tooling. If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we’re looking for someone who is excited to join the team.

THIS ROLE IS REQUIRED TO BE BASED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the open AI routing and infrastructure layer that enterprises use to access, manage, and optimize the best large language models across providers, without lock-in, capacity constraints, or unnecessary cost. We power some of the most advanced AI teams in the world by giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve. As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads. The Role We're looking for a Community Lead to become the heartbeat of OpenRouter's developer community. You will be the person our community knows by name and recognizes in person, the one who is always around, always listening, and always making the community a better place to be. OpenRouter's Discord is already one of the largest AI communities anywhere. Over 50,000 members, hundreds of threads, and thousands of chats every week. It is THE place where people talk about models, harnesses, new techniques, and projects. Not just OpenRouter, but AI in general. You are a community person first and a developer at heart. You've built with LLMs, you understand what AI builders care about, and you're fluent in the culture of the spaces where they gather. You will own this Discord and grow our presence across Twitter/X, Reddit, and other community channels, turning an already thriving community into the best place on the internet to be an AI builder. This is a hands-on, founding community role. In the first 3 months, you will be the primary steward of the community, with the opportunity to shape how the function scales over time. You'll work closely with our DevRel and marketing teams as a complementary, community-focused counterpart. Everything you do in this role should be 1:n. Instead of hosting one meetup, you create the event kit that lets a community member in any city run their own. Instead of answering the same question ten times, you build the automation that surfaces it once. Instead of personally moderating every channel, you recruit and equip a mod team that scales without you. The focus is digital first, roughly an 80/20 split between online community work and in-person community events to start. This role is not about selling or broadcasting. It is about presence, trust, and making OpenRouter's community a place developers genuinely want to be. What You'll Do Discord Stewardship: Own and run OpenRouter's Discord end to end. Design and run Discord-specific events, giveaways, and challenges that keep the community engaged and growing. Community Programs: Own and scale our recognition programs for contributors and helpers, such as special Discord roles for members who help us find bugs or support other members, and design new programs as the community grows. Moderation & Mod Team: Recruit, onboard, and support a team of community moderators. Design non-monetary recognition and benefits that make moderating OpenRouter's community rewarding. Community Pulse: Be the full-time ears of the company. Actively listen to how the community feels about OpenRouter, about models, and about the AI space overall, and report that pulse back to the team continuously. Community Automations: Build and maintain automations that surface community sentiment, trends, and signals at scale, extending the tooling we've already started. In-Person Community Events: Partner with our events team to make community events a flywheel over time. Instead of running events one by one, build the playbooks, resources, and support that let community members in different locales launch their own OpenRouter events. Social Presence: Extend community energy to Twitter/X and other socials, engaging with developers where they are and amplifying community moments. Product Feedback Loop: Own the loop from community to product. Synthesize community feedback, bug reports, and sentiment into actionable insights for engineering, product, and design, and close the loop back to the community when their input ships. Collaboration: Partner with marketing and DevRel on community-facing campaigns, launches, and content as a complementary community voice. What Success Looks Like (First 6 Months) OpenRouter's Discord is widely seen as one of the best AI builder communities, with a regular cadence of events, challenges, and giveaways. A healthy, active moderator team is in place with clear roles, recognition, and benefits. Community members are consistently recognized for their contributions through structured role and reward programs. The team has a reliable, always-on read of community sentiment about OpenRouter, models, and the broader AI space, supported by automation. Community feedback visibly informs product decisions and roadmap prioritization. What We're Looking For 3+ years of experience in community management, developer community, or a closely related role. Experience running Discord communities (or similar) at meaningful scale, including events, programs, and moderation. Hands-on experience building with LLMs and their APIs. You've shipped projects using them, can read and write example code, and can credibly discuss model tradeoffs, harnesses, and techniques with working developers. Personable, humble, and highly accessible. The kind of person a community naturally gravitates toward. Terminally online in the best way. You already live in the spaces where AI developers hang out and you know the current mood of the space at any given moment. Strong written communication with a natural, human voice across Discord, Twitter/X, and Reddit. Background designing contributor, ambassador, or moderator programs. Experience running online events, hackathons, giveaways, or community challenges. A 1:n mindset. You build programs and systems that scale the community, not one-off interactions. Self-directed and entrepreneurial. Able to define problems, identify leverage, and execute independently. Comfortable being publicly visible as a representative of OpenRouter. The ideal candidate is based in the Bay Area, or has the ability to travel for events regularly. Nice to Have Experience building automations or lightweight tooling for community listening and sentiment tracking. Experience running or scaling in-person community events and meetups across cities or regions. Familiarity with OpenRouter as a user. Experience creating light content (threads, clips, memes, recaps) that resonates with developer audiences. Why OpenRouter Work at the center of the AI infrastructure stack as enterprises define how they adopt LLMs. High ownership and autonomy to define how community scales at OpenRouter. Opportunity to shape a foundational function at a fast-growing company. Fully remote team with a culture of autonomy and trust. Competitive compensation, including base salary and equity.