openrouter - Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem

• 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. • 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.