Forward Deployed Engineer

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Oversee the technical onboarding process for new clients following contract finalization, facilitating their transition from kickoff to production deployment.

• Collaborate with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to establish success plans, implementation milestones, and technical adoption objectives.

• Assist clients in integrating OpenRouter into their applications, workflows, infrastructure, and developer environments.

• Resolve issues related to API, SDK, model selection, routing, latency, reliability, and deployment.

• Develop implementation guides, reference architectures, code samples, and reusable playbooks for prevalent customer scenarios.

• Work with clients to grasp their AI use cases, application architecture, traffic patterns, and inference objectives.

• Propose strategies for model selection, provider choices, routing, fallback mechanisms, caching, and cost optimization based on customer requirements.

• Examine usage patterns to uncover opportunities for enhanced adoption, improved reliability, cost reduction, or expansion into new workloads.

• Aid customers in evaluating models and providers based on quality, latency, cost, reliability, privacy, and scalability needs.

• Guide clients from initial API usage to extensive production deployment across teams and applications.

• Establish strong technical relationships with customer developers, engineering leaders, AI teams, and platform teams.

• Conduct technical workshops, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions.

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor for clients developing AI-native products, agents, internal tools, and production LLM workflows.

• Simplify complex technical concepts into actionable advice for developers and business stakeholders.

• Advocate for developer needs internally and enhance the customer implementation experience.

• Collaborate closely with Customer Success to boost retention, adoption, customer health, and expansion.

• Work with Sales on technical expansion opportunities and strategic account development.

• Partner with Product and Engineering to communicate customer feedback, feature requests, integration challenges, and product deficiencies.

• Contribute to internal knowledge repositories, customer playbooks, onboarding resources, and best practices.

• Help shape the standard for outstanding post-sales technical engagement at OpenRouter.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 4 years of experience in a technical customer-facing position such as Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager, Developer Advocate, or Customer Engineer.

• Strong foundation in software engineering with the capability to read, write, and debug production-level code.

• Experience with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure.

• Knowledge of LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency/cost trade-offs, and production AI application patterns.

• Ability to engage directly with developers and engineering leaders to troubleshoot issues and devise practical solutions.

• Strong customer instincts: capable of driving outcomes, managing uncertainty, and establishing trust.

• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, particularly in conveying technical subjects to diverse audiences.

• High ownership, a proactive mindset, and comfort with working in a fast-paced startup environment.

🏝️ Benefits

• Health insurance

• Retirement plans

• Paid time off

• Flexible work hours

• Professional development opportunities