Forward Deployed Engineer
OpenRouter5 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
OpenRouter builds a unified API and routing layer that lets developers and enterprises access, compare, and manage large language models across multiple providers, with tooling for chat, evals, and usage controls. The company monetizes through metered API usage and enterprise plans that add governance and reliability features. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in New York, it supports hundreds of third-party models and an active developer community on Discord.