---
title: 'Director, Customer Support at OpenRouter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/director-customer-support-openrouter-san-francisco-bay-area-n4f5vrxt5j9a'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-24'
---

# Director, Customer Support 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/3664588e-861e-4917-8be9-e4e443fafe13

## 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 Support to build and scale the next generation of technical support at OpenRouter. This is a builder role, not a pure support management role. Our goal isn't to scale support by continuously adding headcount. It's to build an AI-native support organization where intelligent systems, AI agents, and exceptional technical talent deliver a world-class experience to developers and enterprises at scale. You'll lead our global support function, our technical support teams, and continuously build and improve the systems that power the customer experience. You'll be hands-on with AI, automation, and developer tooling while ensuring our customers receive fast, accurate, and deeply technical support. The ideal candidate has led Customer Support at a hyperscaling AI-native company or model lab, understands what developers expect from mission-critical AI infrastructure, and has a track record of building systems that scale faster than the teams operating them.

## What You'll Do

- Build an AI-Native Support Organization: Own the strategy and execution for a support function designed around AI, automation, and technical excellence rather than traditional headcount growth.
- Engineer for Scale: Build, orchestrate, and continuously improve AI agents, workflows, and internal tools that increase support capacity, quality, and efficiency.
- Own the Developer Experience: Deliver exceptional technical support for developers, AI-native startups, and enterprise customers building production applications on OpenRouter.
- Lead Technical Support Operations: Own support performance, incident response, escalations, global coverage, and enterprise SLAs across our customer base.
- Drive Operational Excellence: Define and improve key metrics including response times, resolution times, customer satisfaction, automation effectiveness, and cost to serve.
- Build a High-Leverage Team: Lead and develop a small, exceptional team of Support Engineers who are equally comfortable debugging technical problems and improving the systems that solve them.
- Create Scalable Solutions: Turn recurring customer issues into better automation, self-service capabilities, documentation, and product improvements.
- Partner Cross-Functionally: Work closely with Engineering, Product, Customer Success, and Forward Deployed Engineering to resolve complex issues and translate customer feedback into lasting improvements.

## What We're Looking For

- AI-Native Leadership: You have managed and scaled Customer Support or Technical Support Engineering at a hyperscaling AI-native company, model lab, or AI infrastructure platform serving developers.
- Proven Support Experience: 8+ years in technical support or support engineering, including 4+ years leading teams through significant growth.
- Builder DNA: You don't just manage people and processes. You've personally built, implemented, or operated AI agents, automations, and technical systems that fundamentally improve how support works.
- Developer-First Mindset: You understand APIs, SDKs, LLMs, inference infrastructure, latency, reliability, and the challenges developers face running AI applications in production.
- Track Record of Scale: You've demonstrated the ability to support significant growth in customers, usage, or ticket volume without proportional increases in headcount.
- Technical Fluency: You're comfortable working with Engineering, investigating complex technical issues, using APIs, and getting hands-on with Python, TypeScript, or similar tools.
- Operational Rigor: You've owned support SLAs, incident management, escalations, and customer experience metrics in a high-growth environment, along with experience building global, 24/7 technical support coverage.
- High Ownership: You move quickly, thrive in ambiguity, and measure success through customer outcomes and the leverage your organization creates.

## Nice to Have

- Experience at a leading LLM model lab, AI inference provider, or developer-first AI infrastructure company.
- Experience building and maintaining production AI agents or agentic workflows for customer-facing operations.
- Experience supporting high-volume API platforms with demanding enterprise reliability requirements.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools, agent frameworks, and modern support platforms.

What Success Looks Like In your first 30 days, you'll understand our customers, support operations, technical challenges, and existing AI-powered systems. You'll identify opportunities to improve support quality and scalability. In your first 60 days, you'll begin shipping meaningful improvements to our support systems, automation, and escalation workflows while establishing clear performance metrics. In your first 90 days, you'll have a clear operating model for scaling technical support, measurable improvements in efficiency and customer experience, and a roadmap for continuing to increase support capacity without proportional headcount growth.

You'll Be a Great Fit If

- You'd rather build a system that solves a thousand problems than hire a team to solve them one at a time.
- You're a leader who still loves to build, debug, experiment, and ship.
- You see AI agents as part of your team, not simply tools your team uses.
- You understand the expectations of developers building mission-critical AI applications.
- You believe exceptional customer support is measured by outcomes, not team size.

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)

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