{"id":18851,"url":"https://alion.io/job/openrouter-forward-deployed-engineer","title":"Forward Deployed Engineer","company":{"id":12361,"name":"OpenRouter","domain":"openrouter.ai","url":"https://alion.io/company/openrouter-ai","size_band":"201-500","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"A","score":88,"open_postings":6,"ghost_share":0,"stale_share":0.5,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":53,"computed_at":"2026-10-19T05:45:15Z"}},"role":"Solutions","role_family":"Solutions","seniority":"middle","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["San Francisco, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":220000,"max":260000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":260000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":4,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"LLM","optional":false},{"name":"OpenRouter","optional":false},{"name":"Prompt Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":true},{"name":"OpenAI","optional":true},{"name":"Python","optional":true},{"name":"Rest API","optional":true},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-01T21:48:30Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-01","last_verified_at":"2026-10-20T03:30:26Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":140,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":[],"days_open":139},"description":"THIS ROLE MUST BE BASED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA (CALIFORNIA)\nAbout OpenRouter\nOpenRouter 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.\nAs 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.\nAbout the Role\nWe are looking for a Forward Deployed Engineer to join our post-sales team and help customers successfully implement, adopt, and scale OpenRouter.\nThis 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.\nYou 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.\nThis 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.\nWhat You’ll Do\nCustomer Implementation\nLead technical onboarding for new customers after contract close, helping them move from kickoff to production usage.\n\nPartner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to define success plans, implementation milestones, and technical adoption goals.\n\nHelp customers integrate OpenRouter into their applications, workflows, infrastructure, and developer environments.\n\nTroubleshoot API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment issues.\n\nCreate implementation guides, reference architectures, code examples, and reusable playbooks for common customer patterns.\n\nInference Adoption and Optimization\nWork with customers to understand their AI use cases, application architecture, traffic patterns, and inference goals.\n\nRecommend model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost-optimization strategies based on customer needs.\n\nAnalyze usage patterns to identify opportunities to increase adoption, improve reliability, reduce cost, or expand into new workloads.\n\nHelp customers evaluate models and providers across quality, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and scale requirements.\n\nDrive customers from initial API usage to broader production deployment across teams and applications.\n\nTechnical and Developer Engagement\nBuild strong technical relationships with customer developers, engineering leaders, AI teams, and platform teams.\n\nRun technical working sessions, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions.\n\nAct as a trusted technical advisor for customers building AI-native products, agents, internal tools, and production LLM workflows.\n\nTranslate complex technical concepts into practical guidance for developers and business stakeholders.\n\nAdvocate for developer needs internally and help improve the customer implementation experience.\n\nCross-Functional Partnership\nPartner closely with Customer Success to improve retention, adoption, customer health, and expansion.\n\nCollaborate with Sales on technical expansion opportunities and strategic account growth.\n\nWork with Product and Engineering to surface customer feedback, feature requests, integration blockers, and product gaps.\n\nContribute to internal knowledge bases, customer playbooks, onboarding materials, and best practices.\n\nHelp define what excellent post-sales technical engagement looks like at OpenRouter.\n\nWhat We’re Looking For\n4+ 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.\n\nStrong software engineering fundamentals and ability to read, write, and debug production-quality code.\n\nExperience working with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure.\n\nFamiliarity with LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency/cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns.\n\nAbility to work directly with developers and engineering leaders to diagnose problems and design practical solutions.\n\nStrong customer instincts: you understand how to drive outcomes, manage ambiguity, and build trust.\n\nExcellent written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining technical topics to mixed audiences.\n\nHigh ownership, bias for action, and comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment.\n\nAbility to be on-site with customers regularly and travel to customer sites as needed.\n\nNice to Have\nExperience with OpenAI-compatible APIs, model routing, evals, observability, or LLM application frameworks.\n\nPrior experience in customer success, post-sales engineering, or implementation roles at an API, infrastructure, developer tools, or AI company.\n\nExperience building AI agents, chat products, copilots, automation workflows, or production LLM applications.\n\nFamiliarity with Python, TypeScript, REST APIs, streaming APIs, and common backend application architectures.\n\nExperience working with enterprise customers, startups, or technical founders.\n\nAbility to create technical content such as guides, demos, example repos, migration docs, or architecture diagrams.\n\nWhat Success Looks Like\nIn your first 30 days, you will learn OpenRouter’s product, customer base, implementation patterns, and post-sales motion. You will shadow customer calls, understand common integration paths, and begin supporting customer onboarding.\nIn your first 60 days, you will independently lead technical implementation workstreams, help customers resolve integration blockers, and contribute reusable technical assets for onboarding and adoption.\nIn your first 90 days, you will own technical success for a set of post-sales customers, drive measurable increases in production usage, identify expansion opportunities, and create a feedback loop between customers, Customer Success, Product, and Engineering.\nYou’ll Be a Great Fit If\nYou enjoy being close to customers and solving real-world implementation problems.\n\nYou are energized by helping developers ship faster and build better AI products.\n\nYou can go deep technically while staying focused on business outcomes.\n\nYou like operating across code, customer conversations, product feedback, and adoption strategy.\n\nYou are comfortable with ambiguity and can turn repeated customer problems into scalable systems, playbooks, and product insights.\n\nYou believe inference is becoming a foundational layer of software and want to help customers adopt it successfully.\n\nIf you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. 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