Forward Deployed Engineer
OpenRouter3 months ago
Remote, United StatesMid Level
Responsibilities
- Lead technical onboarding for new customers from kickoff through production usage.
- Help customers integrate OpenRouter into applications, workflows, infrastructure, and developer environments.
- Troubleshoot API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment issues.
- Recommend model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost-optimization strategies.
- Evaluate models and providers across quality, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and scale requirements.
- Drive broader production adoption across customer teams and applications.
- Run technical working sessions, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions.
- Partner with Customer Success, Sales, Product, and Engineering on adoption, expansion, customer feedback, and implementation improvements.
- Create implementation guides, reference architectures, code examples, playbooks, onboarding materials, and knowledge-base content.
- Own technical success for a set of post-sales customers and establish scalable post-sales technical engagement practices.
Requirements
- 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 with the ability to read, write, and debug production-quality code.
- Experience with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure.
- Familiarity with LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency and cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns.
- Ability to diagnose problems and design practical solutions with developers and engineering leaders.
- Strong customer instincts, ownership, adaptability, and ability to build trust.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills for explaining technical topics to mixed audiences.
- Preferred experience with OpenAI-compatible APIs, model routing, evaluations, observability, or LLM application frameworks.
- Preferred experience building AI agents, chat products, copilots, automation workflows, or production LLM applications.
- Preferred familiarity with Python, TypeScript, REST APIs, streaming APIs, and common backend application architectures.
- Preferred experience with enterprise customers, startups, or technical founders.
- Ability to create technical content such as guides, demos, example repositories, migration documentation, or architecture diagrams.
Tech Stack
Categories
Forward Deployed
About OpenRouter
The unified interface for LLMs. 400+ models (incl. 50+ free), explorable data, private chat, & a unified API. Join our community on Discord - https://openrouter.ai/discord Checkout the "Live" model rankings - https://openrouter.ai/rankings See the enterprise offering - https://openrouter.ai/enterprise