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Forward Deployed Engineer

OpenRouter· GTM
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Hybrid (San Francisco Bay Area, California)$220k - $260kFull-timePosted 4mo ago

About the role

OpenRouter is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join the post-sales team to help customers implement, adopt, and scale OpenRouter. This role blends customer success, support, customer engineering, product, and developer relations, working hands-on with developers to integrate OpenRouter into production systems and expand usage across teams.

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • Understand customer 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 with Customer Success to improve retention, adoption, 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.

Qualifications

  • 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.
  • Ability to be on-site with customers regularly and travel to customer sites as needed.

Skills

Required:Technical onboardingAPI/SDK troubleshooting
Last updated Sep 16, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About OpenRouter

The Unified Interface For LLMs

A router for LLMs and other AI models

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