---
title: 'Software Engineer, Ori at OpenRouter'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineer-ori-openrouter-united-states-hhnpazwg5tmq'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-17'
---

# Software Engineer, Ori at OpenRouter

- **Company:** OpenRouter
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-10-06
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-17
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/cd315f34-75a7-4717-8aa9-9dd4e0d6f7ae

## 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

We're hiring a Software Engineer on our Ori, to build out our family of products for putting any model to work in your terminal, in Slack, and on your desktop. Ori is built to answer the question from large buyer ICP, we are building the client side products for massive enterprise adoption of OpenRouter beyond the engineering organization. Ori is small team built the current product in a few months. You'll work with that team, which is led by one of our co-founders, alongside product, design and the platform teams Ori is built on. This is a hands-on IC role with broad surface area and little process between you and shipping.

## What You'll Do

- Build and ship across every Ori surface: the ori CLI and its harness integrations.
- Make model fungibility real in any harness. That means model switching, provider fallbacks, tool and prompt settings tuned to each model, and respecting org guardrails, all without extra auth for the user.
- Build the agent runtime underneath. That includes sandboxed agents that never see their own credentials, secrets management, session management and compaction, and skills that agents can learn, share and inherit across models.
- Take agents from a laptop to the cloud: deploy, fork and shut down agents on command, with agent state that is version-controlled and auditable.
- Own quality end to end, from install, auth and CLI UX to reliability, observability and evals. Ori is heavily dogfooded internally, so you'll use what you build every day.
- Feed the gaps Ori exposes back into OpenRouter's API and SDKs, so the whole ecosystem can build multi-model agents on the same primitives.

## What We're Looking For

- 5+ years shipping production software, with real ownership of developer tools, CLIs, agent products or the infrastructure behind them.
- Daily fluency with coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi or Hermes, and specific opinions about what makes an agent loop, a harness or a tool integration good.
- A solid grasp of how agents work under the hood: tool calling, context management, prompt caching, evals, and the cost, latency and quality tradeoffs between models.
- Good systems judgment for running agents safely: sandboxing, process isolation, secrets, and reliability across many users.
- High agency and a bias toward action. You talk to users, prototype, ship and iterate on a small team with fluid boundaries.
- Product taste for developer tools. You notice interaction details and care how the first five minutes feel.

## Nice to Have

- Built or maintained an open-source agent harness, CLI or developer tool. Experience with multi-agent systems, agent skills or memory, or eval and benchmarking tools.Shipped a Slack app or a native macOS app.Existing user of OpenRouter or Ori, or active side projects in AI tooling.

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria above but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone 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
- [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
- [Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem](https://feeny.ai/job/engineering-manager-provider-ecosystem-openrouter-united-states-gyn2ks85jeq4) — 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