Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem

Compensation

$245K – $295K • Offers Equity

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.

About the Role

The Provider Ecosystem team owns the supply side of OpenRouter: every model, endpoint, and provider the router can send a request to. This is a hands-on leadership role reporting to the VPE. You’ll grow the team, stay deep in the code, and be OpenRouter’s technical face to the labs and providers we partner with.

What You'll Do

• Lead the team: hire and grow strong engineers, set the roadmap, stay hands-on in code reviews and incidents, and advocate for the team with leadership.
• Core Provider: own provider adapters, the endpoint lifecycle, and routing. Be the technical counterpart for top providers, run day-zero and stealth launches, and work with GTM, BD, and legal to get providers from signed NDA to live in weeks, not months.
• Multi-Modal: lead the expansion beyond text into image, video, audio, and embeddings, plus realtime and batch inference.
• Benchmarks: own evals and inference quality, and turn that data into routing decisions and direct feedback that makes providers better.

What We're Looking For

• 4+ years of engineering management experience, including at least one environment where you built or scaled a team during a period of rapid growth.
• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, API design, and LLM inference.
• Hands-on and comfortable staying that way. You write code, use AI-assisted development tools, and lead by example in a team where everyone ships.
• Comfortable being externally facing. You can sit across from a model lab’s engineering team, negotiate an integration, and represent OpenRouter’s technical requirements without a PM in the room.
• Data-driven about quality. You want benchmarks, evals, and production telemetry deciding which provider gets traffic, not vibes.
• Proven ability to recruit and retain strong engineers.
• High agency and clear communication. You don’t wait for direction, you identify what matters, make a plan, and drive it forward.

Nice to Haves

• Experience at an inference provider, model lab, or GPU cloud, or building products on top of many LLM APIs at once.
• Experience with our stack: TypeScript, Cloudflare Workers, Postgres, ClickHouse, GCP, or Vercel.
• Background in evals, benchmarking, or routing and load-balancing systems.
• Experience shipping multimodal APIs (image, video, speech, embeddings) or realtime and batch inference.
• Experience running vendor security and compliance reviews (NDA, DPA, SOC 2) as part of a partner onboarding process.