Forward Deployed Engineer
Why it's interesting
OpenRouter — the de facto default LLM routing layer for a huge chunk of the indie/startup AI stack — posting its first FDE-flavored seat is a tell: infra companies that used to be self-serve-only are now embedding with customers the same way frontier labs do. The job is unusually infra-native: routing, fallback, caching, and cost optimization instead of the usual "build agents" mandate.
The role
Lead technical onboarding for customers moving from kickoff to production usage; troubleshoot API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment issues; create implementation guides and playbooks; recommend optimization strategies for model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost; build relationships with customer engineering leaders and surface feedback to Product/Engineering. Wants 4+ years in technical customer-facing roles, strong production coding ability, API/SDK/cloud/AI-platform experience, and LLM/inference knowledge. Must be based in the SF Bay Area with regular onsite customer visits.
Applications go directly to the company. We curate; we don't broker.