OpenRouter
1 open Forward Deployed Engineer role at OpenRouter. Curated with comp bands.
On the board since Sep 2026 · still hiring
Our take
Why OpenRouter
Infra-native FDE at the default LLM router — routing, fallback and cost work instead of agent-building, with a reported Stripe acquisition hanging over the equity story.
- FDE type
- Solutions engineering
- Travel
- Medium
- Comp
- Undisclosed
- Stage
- Late-stage
A good fit if you're…
- Solutions or platform engineers with deep API/SDK and inference knowledge
- People who like optimizing latency, reliability and cost more than building agents
- Bay Area-based candidates comfortable with onsite customer visits
What they do
OpenRouter is a unified API and marketplace that routes developer traffic across hundreds of models and providers. It is the default model-switching layer for much of the startup AI stack, and increasingly for enterprises that want to control model spend.
What “forward deployed” means here
The seat leads technical onboarding from kickoff to production: debugging SDK, routing, latency and reliability issues, writing implementation playbooks, and recommending provider, fallback and caching strategies. It sits closer to a senior solutions engineer than a Palantir-style embed — the product does the work, you make it land in the customer's stack. We tagged it solutions-eng for that reason.
Comp & leveling
No band is disclosed. The equity math is unusual: Bloomberg reported in July 2026 that Stripe agreed to acquire OpenRouter for more than $7B, so ask directly how new-hire grants convert and whether refresh terms change after the deal.
Growth signals
OpenRouter announced a $113M CapitalG-led Series B in May 2026, citing 25T tokens of weekly volume. A self-serve infra company hiring its first FDE-flavored seat says enterprise revenue is now the growth vector.
Analysis updated 2026-09-28
Open roles at OpenRouter
Compare OpenRouter
Head-to-head
Others in the same tier
Free forever. Unsubscribe anytime.