Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. OpenRouter is an AI routing and infrastructure company that helps enterprises access, manage, and optimize large language models across providers. The Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem will lead the team responsible for provider adapters, endpoint lifecycle, routing, multimodal expansion, and inference quality while remaining hands-on in engineering and serving as the technical representative to model labs and inference providers.
Responsibilities
- 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
Skills
- 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
Benefits
- Equity
- Remote work
Company Overview