Forward Deployed Engineer

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.

We are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our post-sales team and help customers successfully implement, adopt, and scale OpenRouter.

This role sits at the intersection of customer success, support, customer engineering, product, and developer relations. You will work directly with our customers after the sale to help them get live quickly, integrate OpenRouter into production systems, improve their inference architecture, and expand usage across teams and applications.

You will be deeply hands-on with developers. You will debug integrations, design implementation paths, advise on model and routing strategy, identify opportunities to increase adoption, and turn customer learnings into product feedback. The ideal candidate is technical enough to earn the trust of engineering teams, commercial enough to understand customer outcomes, and proactive enough to drive customers from initial implementation to scaled production usage.

This role will require the ability to work regularly from our customers' offices across the San Francisco Bay Area and potentially travel to other locations as needed.

Lead technical onboarding for new customers after contract close, helping them move from kickoff to production usage.

Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to define success plans, implementation milestones, and technical adoption goals.

Help customers integrate OpenRouter into their applications, workflows, infrastructure, and developer environments.

Troubleshoot API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment issues.

Create implementation guides, reference architectures, code examples, and reusable playbooks for common customer patterns.

Work with customers to understand their AI use cases, application architecture, traffic patterns, and inference goals.

Recommend model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost-optimization strategies based on customer needs.

Analyze usage patterns to identify opportunities to increase adoption, improve reliability, reduce cost, or expand into new workloads.

Help customers evaluate models and providers across quality, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and scale requirements.

Drive customers from initial API usage to broader production deployment across teams and applications.

Build strong technical relationships with customer developers, engineering leaders, AI teams, and platform teams.

Run technical working sessions, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions.

Act as a trusted technical advisor for customers building AI-native products, agents, internal tools, and production LLM workflows.

Translate complex technical concepts into practical guidance for developers and business stakeholders.

Advocate for developer needs internally and help improve the customer implementation experience.

Partner closely with Customer Success to improve retention, adoption, customer health, and expansion.

Collaborate with Sales on technical expansion opportunities and strategic account growth.

Work with Product and Engineering to surface customer feedback, feature requests, integration blockers, and product gaps.

Contribute to internal knowledge bases, customer playbooks, onboarding materials, and best practices.

Help define what excellent post-sales technical engagement looks like at OpenRouter.

4+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager, Developer Advocate, or Customer Engineer.

Strong software engineering fundamentals and ability to read, write, and debug production-quality code.

Experience working with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure.

Familiarity with LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency/cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns.

Ability to work directly with developers and engineering leaders to diagnose problems and design practical solutions.

Strong customer instincts: you understand how to drive outcomes, manage ambiguity, and build trust.

Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining technical topics to mixed audiences.

High ownership, bias for action, and comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment.