---
title: 'Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem at OpenRouter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-provider-ecosystem-openrouter-united-states-gyn2ks85jeq4'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem at OpenRouter

- **Company:** OpenRouter
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-28
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/3dc7b628-b92b-45e4-a13b-43621f3056a9

## Job description

## 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

## 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

- [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
- [GRC Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/grc-manager-openrouter-united-states-72y537rhzzyq) — United States
- [Software Engineer, Trust & Safety](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-trust-safety-openrouter-united-states-5hgj3pzc4aa4) — United States
- [Solutions Architect](https://feeny.ai/job/solutions-architect-openrouter-united-states-qr713fthv7qn) — United States