Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem

About this role

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. We power the most advanced AI teams in the world by giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve.

As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads.

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. That means hundreds of providers, thousands of endpoints, and millions of requests a day, in a model landscape that changes every week.

You’ll be at the front of the industry. Labs and inference providers want to reach OpenRouter’s users, so this team gets early access to novel inference offerings, often through exclusive and stealth launches, and gets them live on day zero.

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.