Forward Deployed Engineer

OpenRouter

Forward Deployed Engineer assisting customers in implementing and scaling OpenRouter API. Engaging with clients to improve their inference architecture and increase model adoption.

Posted 6/1/2026full-timeRemote • 🇺🇸 United StatesMid-LevelSeniorWebsite

Tech Stack

Tools & technologies

Cloud

About the role

Key responsibilities & impact

Lead technical onboarding for new customers after contract close, helping them move from kickoff to production usage.
Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to define success plans, implementation milestones, and technical adoption goals.
Help customers integrate OpenRouter into their applications, workflows, infrastructure, and developer environments.
Troubleshoot API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment issues.
Create implementation guides, reference architectures, code examples, and reusable playbooks for common customer patterns.
Work with customers to understand their AI use cases, application architecture, traffic patterns, and inference goals.
Recommend model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost-optimization strategies based on customer needs.
Analyze usage patterns to identify opportunities to increase adoption, improve reliability, reduce cost, or expand into new workloads.
Help customers evaluate models and providers across quality, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and scale requirements.
Drive customers from initial API usage to broader production deployment across teams and applications.
Build strong technical relationships with customer developers, engineering leaders, AI teams, and platform teams.
Run technical working sessions, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions.
Act as a trusted technical advisor for customers building AI-native products, agents, internal tools, and production LLM workflows.
Translate complex technical concepts into practical guidance for developers and business stakeholders.
Advocate for developer needs internally and help improve the customer implementation experience.
Partner closely with Customer Success to improve retention, adoption, customer health, and expansion.
Collaborate with Sales on technical expansion opportunities and strategic account growth.
Work with Product and Engineering to surface customer feedback, feature requests, integration blockers, and product gaps.
Contribute to internal knowledge bases, customer playbooks, onboarding materials, and best practices.
Help define what excellent post-sales technical engagement looks like at OpenRouter.

Requirements

What you’ll need

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 and ability to read, write, and debug production-quality code.
Experience working with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure.
Familiarity with LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency/cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns.
Ability to work directly with developers and engineering leaders to diagnose problems and design practical solutions.
Strong customer instincts: you understand how to drive outcomes, manage ambiguity, and build trust.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills, especially when explaining technical topics to mixed audiences.
High ownership, bias for action, and comfort operating in a fast-moving startup environment.

Benefits

Comp & perks

Health insurance
Retirement plans
Paid time off
Flexible work hours
Professional development opportunities

ATS Keywords

✓ Tailor your resume

Applicant Tracking System Keywords

Tip: use these terms in your resume and cover letter to boost ATS matches.

Hard Skills & Tools

APISDKcloud infrastructureAI/ML infrastructureLLMsmodel evaluationprompt engineeringproduction AI application patternsproduction-quality codetroubleshooting

Soft Skills

customer instinctscommunication skillsproblem diagnosissolution designtrust buildingownershipbias for actionadaptabilitycollaborationtechnical advisory