--- title: 'Director, Customer Success at OpenRouter' canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-customer-success-openrouter-san-francisco-bay-area-n25qjkq4mvjm' type: 'job' last_seen: '2026-10-24' --- # Director, Customer Success at OpenRouter - **Company:** OpenRouter - **Location:** San Francisco Bay Area, CA - **Employment:** full-time - **Work type:** hybrid - **Posted:** 2026-10-23 - **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-24 - **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/c0ae7a38-cd46-4bc8-b0d2-3b38cac5a424 ## Job description ## About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the unified interface for AI inference, giving developers and organizations access to hundreds of models through a single API. Our platform helps teams choose, route, evaluate, and scale model usage across providers, making it easier to build production AI applications with the right model for every use case. As inference becomes a core operating layer for modern software companies, OpenRouter helps customers move faster, reduce complexity, and get more value from the rapidly evolving model ecosystem. ## About the Role We're looking for a Director of Customer Success to build and scale the next generation of Customer Success at OpenRouter. This is a builder role, not a traditional Customer Success management role. Our ambition is to build an AI-native Customer Success organization that combines exceptional customer relationships, deep technical expertise, and intelligent systems to drive adoption, retention, and growth at scale. You'll own our Customer Success strategy and execution across AI-native startups, enterprises, and strategic customers. You'll lead a team of Customer Success Managers, partner closely with Forward Deployed Engineering, Support and Sales, and build the systems that help our customers realize value from OpenRouter. The ideal candidate has led Customer Success at a hyperscaling AI-native company, model lab, or developer infrastructure platform. You understand consumption-based businesses, can build trusted relationships with technical and executive stakeholders, and know how to turn customer usage into measurable business outcomes. We're looking for someone who can operate at both ends of the spectrum: personally engage with our largest strategic customers while building AI-powered systems and scalable programs that support thousands of growing developers and startups. ## What You'll Do - Build an AI-Native Customer Success Organization: Define and execute a Customer Success strategy that scales through intelligent systems, automation, and high-impact customer engagement rather than proportional headcount growth. - Drive Adoption and Customer Value: Own the customer journey from onboarding through production adoption, value realization, retention, and expansion across our customer segments. - Own Retention and Growth: Drive Gross Revenue Retention (GRR), Net Revenue Retention (NRR), customer health, and inference consumption growth. Partner with Sales on strategic renewals and expansion opportunities. - Build Scalable Customer Engagement: Develop AI-powered workflows, customer intelligence, and lifecycle programs that proactively identify risks, uncover growth opportunities, and deliver personalized engagement at scale. - Lead Strategic Customer Relationships: Build trusted relationships with developers, technical leaders, founders, and executives at some of the world's most innovative AI companies and enterprises. - Build a High-Performance Team: Lead and develop exceptional Customer Success Managers who combine technical fluency, commercial acumen, and strong customer ownership. - Drive Operational Excellence: Establish customer health frameworks, success plans, adoption milestones, executive business reviews, and measurable customer outcomes. - Partner Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Sales, Forward Deployed Engineering, Product, and Support to accelerate customer activation, resolve adoption barriers, and identify opportunities for growth. - Turn Customer Insights Into Action: Use product telemetry, inference usage, customer feedback, and business signals to drive proactive engagement and influence product strategy. ## What We're Looking For - AI-Native Leadership: Experience leading and scaling Customer Success at a hyperscaling AI-native company, model lab, or developer-first infrastructure platform. - Proven Customer Success Experience: 8+ years in Customer Success, account management, or related post-sales functions, including 4+ years leading teams through significant growth. - Builder DNA: You've personally built scalable Customer Success programs, workflows, automations, or AI-powered systems that meaningfully improve customer outcomes and team effectiveness. - Developer-First Mindset: You understand APIs, SDKs, LLMs, inference infrastructure, and the challenges of taking AI applications from experimentation into production. - Commercial Ownership: You have a strong track record of driving retention, expansion, NRR, GRR, and consumption growth in usage-based or subscription businesses. - Strategic Customer Leadership: You're comfortable engaging with developers, engineering leaders, founders, and C-level executives, translating technical adoption into measurable business value. - Track Record of Scale: You've built repeatable customer engagement models that support significant growth in customers and revenue without proportional increases in headcount. - Data-Driven Approach: You use product usage, customer health, adoption signals, and revenue data to prioritize engagement and drive outcomes. - High Ownership: You move quickly, thrive in ambiguity, and are comfortable balancing hands-on customer work with building long-term organizational capabilities. ## Nice to Have - Experience at a leading LLM model lab, AI inference platform, or developer-first AI infrastructure company. - Experience managing enterprise and AI-native startup customer segments. - Experience building AI agents, automated customer lifecycle programs, or intelligent customer engagement workflows. - Familiarity with model routing, inference economics, latency, reliability, and production AI workloads. - Experience building Customer Success organizations in consumption-based, product-led growth environments. - Experience partnering closely with Forward Deployed Engineering or technical implementation teams. What Success Looks Like In your first 30 days, you'll develop a deep understanding of OpenRouter's customers, product usage, customer journey, and existing post-sales operations. You'll establish relationships with strategic customers and identify opportunities to improve adoption, retention, and scalability. In your first 60 days, you'll establish clear customer health and revenue visibility, refine customer engagement models across segments, and begin implementing scalable workflows that improve customer outcomes and team effectiveness. In your first 90 days, you'll have a clear operating model for Customer Success, measurable progress against adoption and retention goals, and a roadmap for scaling customer engagement through AI, automation, and a highly capable team. You'll Be a Great Fit If - You believe great Customer Success is about driving measurable customer outcomes, not just managing relationships. - You're a leader who loves to build, experiment, and ship, not just manage teams and processes. - You see AI agents and automation as a natural extension of how your organization operates. - You understand how developers adopt infrastructure and how technical adoption translates into business growth. - You're equally comfortable working with a startup founder, an engineering team, or a Fortune 100 executive. - You're commercially minded and take ownership of retention, expansion, and customer value. - You can turn repeated customer challenges into scalable systems and playbooks. - You believe the best Customer Success organizations combine exceptional people with exceptional leverage. If you don't think you meet all of the criteria but are still 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 ## Company Overview - **One-liner**: OpenRouter provides a unified API that gives developers access to 400+ large language models from 70+ providers through a single interface. - **Entity Type**: Private (Series B) - **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States - **Founded**: 2023 - **Founders**: Alex Atallah (CEO, Co-Founder), Louis Vichy (Co-Founder) ## Core Business - **Primary industry**: AI Infrastructure / Developer Tools - **Target customers**: B2B — software developers, AI application builders, and enterprises building agentic and LLM-powered products. - **Mission or purpose**: To be the unified interface for LLMs, helping developers build AI applications without worrying about provider lock-in, downtime, or complex integrations. ## Products & Services - **Unified LLM API**: A single, OpenAI-compatible API endpoint that provides access to 400+ models from 70+ providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Mistral, etc.). Handles authentication, request routing, rate limiting, and automatic failover. Developers avoid managing separate API keys and billing relationships. - **Enterprise Offering**: Custom data policies, fine-grained provider controls, and dedicated support for organizations that need data governance and compliance. - **Model & App Rankings**: A public leaderboard and community hub for discovering top-performing models and AI applications built on the platform. ## Market Standing - **Valuation**: Not publicly disclosed. - **Key Metric**: Total funding of **$200M** across multiple rounds (Seed, Series A, Series B). - **Latest Funding**: $120M venture round in April 2026. - **Notable Investors**: Andreessen Horowitz, Menlo Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, ServiceNow Ventures, League of Generalists. - **Growth Signals**: Processes **100 trillion tokens monthly**; serves **250k+ apps** and **4.2M+ global users**; headcount grew **+611% year-over-year** to 46 employees; LinkedIn followers grew **+871.9% year-over-year** to 14,754. ## Competitive Advantages - **Provider Agnosticism**: Developers are not locked into a single provider; OpenRouter handles failover and routing across 70+ providers, ensuring high availability and resilience. - **Cost Optimization**: Offers better prices than going direct to many providers, with no subscription fees — users simply buy credits. - **Massive Model Selection**: 400+ models in one API, from frontier reasoning models to lightweight, cost-optimized options, enabling dynamic model selection per task. - **OpenAI-Compatible SDK**: Drop-in replacement for existing OpenAI integrations, minimizing migration friction. ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling Infrastructure**: Building distributed inference infrastructure to improve reliability and reduce latency for global users. - **Enterprise Adoption**: Growing enterprise sales team and launching dedicated enterprise features (data policies, compliance controls). - **Agentic Development**: Supporting the next wave of autonomous AI agents with robust routing, fallback, and observability. - **Platform Expansion**: Growing the ecosystem of featured agents and apps built on OpenRouter. ## Why Work Here - **Remote First**: Flexibility to work from anywhere in the US. - **Small, High-Impact Team**: ~46 employees with a flat structure where every person has direct impact on the product and users. - **Competitive Compensation**: Top-of-market salary and equity packages. - **Health & Wellness**: Fully covered health, dental, and vision plans for you and your dependents. - **WFH Budget**: Annual stipend for home office setup and internet. - **Unlimited PTO**: Encouraged time off to recharge. - **Quarterly Offsites**: Regular team gatherings to connect in person. - **Engineering Culture**: High ownership, small team punching above its weight, building critical AI infrastructure at massive scale (100T tokens/month). ## Strategic Focus - **Scaling Infrastructure**: Building distributed inference routing to improve reliability and reduce latency globally. - **Enterprise Growth**: Expanding enterprise sales, security, and compliance features to serve larger organizations. - **Agentic Ecosystem**: Supporting the next wave of autonomous AI agents with robust routing, fallback, and observability. - **Platform Expansion**: Growing the marketplace of featured agents and apps, and deepening integrations with developer tools. ## Competitive Advantages - **Provider Agnosticism**: Developers are not locked into a single provider; OpenRouter handles failover and routing across 70+ providers, ensuring high availability. - **Cost Optimization**: Offers better prices than going direct to many providers, with no subscription fees — users simply buy credits. - **Massive Model Selection**: 400+ models in one API, from frontier reasoning models to lightweight, cost-optimized options. - **OpenAI-Compatible SDK**: Drop-in replacement for existing OpenAI integrations, minimizing migration friction. ## Why Work Here - **Remote First**: Flexibility to work from anywhere in the US. - **High Impact, Small Team**: ~46 employees, each with direct impact on the product and millions of users. - **Competitive Compensation**: Top-of-market salary and equity packages. - **Health & Wellness**: Fully covered health, dental, and vision plans for you and your dependents. - **WFH Budget**: Annual stipend for home office setup and internet. - **Unlimited PTO**: Encouraged time off to recharge. - **Quarterly Offsites**: Regular team gatherings to connect in person. - **Engineering Culture**: High ownership, small team punching above its weight, building critical AI infrastructure at massive scale. ## Sources 1. [openrouter.ai](https://openrouter.ai/) 2. [openrouter.ai/careers](https://openrouter.ai/careers) 3. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/) 4. [cbinsights.com](https://www.cbinsights.com/company/openrouter) 5. [linkedin.com/company/openrouter](https://www.linkedin.com/company/openrouter) ## Other roles at OpenRouter - [Director, Customer Support](https://feeny.ai/job/director-customer-support-openrouter-san-francisco-bay-area-n4f5vrxt5j9a) — San Francisco Bay Area, CA - [Software Engineer, Money Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-money-platform-openrouter-united-states-j7dwfxd67nt3) — United States - [Software Engineer, Identity Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-identity-platform-openrouter-united-states-hpdb136h7c3s) — United States - [Site Reliability Engineer, Provider Operations](https://feeny.ai/job/site-reliability-engineer-provider-operations-openrouter-united-states-j18dk08e73e4) — United States - [Customer Engineer, APAC](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-engineer-apac-openrouter-apac-1mra2rf7fwfw) — APAC - [Business Development Representative, Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/business-development-representative-enterprise-openrouter-united-states-r9ksdb1qmwtj) — United States - [IT Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/it-manager-openrouter-new-york-h4f8zd8xr9bm) — New York, NY - [Software Engineer, Ori](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ori-openrouter-united-states-hhnpazwg5tmq) — United States - [Product Marketing Manager, Enterprise](https://feeny.ai/job/product-marketing-manager-enterprise-openrouter-united-states-2q95fjg7keq8) — United States - [Product Manager, OpenRouter Connect](https://feeny.ai/job/product-manager-openrouter-connect-openrouter-united-states-528m22mvv1h8) — United States