# Research Scientist

**Company**: OpenRouter
**Location**: Remote (US)
**Work arrangement**: remote
**Experience**: senior
**Job type**: Full time
**Category**: Engineering
**Industry**: Technology

**Apply**: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/8daf0f29-2e78-4ab1-8230-52e3988fe42c?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply
**Canonical**: https://yubhub.co/jobs/job_c2a92f1d-d27

## Description

As a Research Scientist at OpenRouter, you will conduct deep, original research that advances how the world understands, evaluates, and routes large language models.

You will own and pursue a research agenda: designing experiments, developing evaluation frameworks, and producing work that shapes how models are compared, selected, and deployed.

Your findings will inform OpenRouter's routing intelligence, public rankings, and the broader AI discourse.

**Responsibilities**

- Own and pursue a research agenda focused on LLM evaluation, model quality, routing optimization, and AI usage patterns, contributing original insights that advance the field.

- Design novel evaluation frameworks and benchmarks that go beyond standard leaderboards, using real-world generation data to capture how models actually perform across tasks and contexts.

- Conduct large-scale empirical studies on LLM behavior: how models compare across providers, how performance changes over time, and how usage patterns reveal strengths and weaknesses.

- Develop the statistical and mathematical foundations behind our routing systems, building the models and heuristics that power intelligent provider and model selection.

- Identify opportunities to apply research findings to feed back into OpenRouter's product and platform.

- Collaborate with external researchers, model providers, and the open-source community to advance shared understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations.

- Work with product and engineering teams to translate research findings into improvements to OpenRouter's platform, without being constrained to a shipping cadence.

**Requirements**

- MS or PhD in a quantitative field (machine learning, statistics, computer science, mathematics, computational linguistics, or similar).

- Track record of original research, demonstrated by first-author publications, significant open-source contributions, or equivalent impact in industry research.

- Deep expertise in statistics, experimental design, and causal inference.

- Strong programming skills in Python.

- Proficiency in SQL for working with large-scale analytical databases.

- Hands-on experience with modern ML/NLP techniques such as LLM evaluation, fine-tuning, embeddings, classification, or reinforcement learning from human feedback.

- Familiarity with the current LLM landscape: model architectures, provider ecosystems, benchmark suites, and the strengths and limitations of leading models.

**Nice to Have**

- Deeply curious and self-directed.

- Rigorous but pragmatic.

- AI-first in your own workflow.

- Strong communicator.

- Collaborative.

## Skills

### Required
- Python
- SQL
- statistics
- experimental design
- causal inference
- machine learning
- NLP
- LLM evaluation

### Nice to have
- reinforcement learning from human feedback
- fine-tuning
- embeddings
- classification

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Source: [Apply at jobs.ashbyhq.com](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/openrouter/8daf0f29-2e78-4ab1-8230-52e3988fe42c?utm_source=yubhub.co&utm_medium=jobs_feed&utm_campaign=apply)