Engineering Manager, Platform

OpenRouter is the leading AI routing and infrastructure layer that enterprises use to access, manage, and optimize the best large language models across providers—without lock-in, capacity constraints, or unnecessary cost. We power the most advanced AI teams in the world by giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve.

As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads.

We're hiring an Engineering Manager for our Platform team. This team owns the infrastructure that powers all of OpenRouter and enables the layer that routes and serves millions of LLM requests every day. The team is small, the surface area is large, and the business is scaling faster than we can keep up with.

This is a hands-on leadership role. You'll manage and grow the platform team while staying deep in the technical work - writing code, making architecture decisions, and debugging production issues alongside your engineers. You'll report to the CEO and work closely with engineering leadership on priorities, trade-offs, and the trajectory of the platform as OpenRouter scales.

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  Build and lead the platform team - hire engineers, set the pace, and create an environment where strong ICs want to stay and grow.

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  Stay hands-on. You're coding, reviewing architecture decisions, and in the weeds on the systems your team owns. The team is small enough that you can't manage from a distance.

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  Own technical direction for the platform - understand the trade-offs across our edge, cloud, and data infrastructure and make the calls that keep things moving.

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  Steer projects through ambiguity. When something stalls or breaks, you debug the situation - whether that's a technical problem, a resourcing gap, or a prioritization call.

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  Partner with engineering leadership on capacity, reliability, and cost across the routing layer, with ownership of the systems carrying production traffic.

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  Represent the platform team's needs and priorities to the broader organization. You're comfortable pushing back, advocating for investments, and making your case directly to leadership.

• 4+ years of engineering management experience, including at least one environment where you built or scaled a team during a period of rapid growth.

• Strong technical foundation in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related domain. You don't need to have used every tool in our stack, but you understand the trade-offs at the systems level - edge compute, distributed systems, databases, security, cloud infrastructure, and the decisions that come with operating at scale.

• Hands-on and comfortable staying that way. You write code, use AI-assisted development tools, and lead by example in a team where everyone ships.

• Proven ability to recruit and retain strong engineers. Ideally, you've built teams people want to join and you bring a network of talent with you.

• High agency and clear communication. You don't wait for direction, you identify what matters, make a plan, and drive it forward. You speak up when you disagree and back it with substance.

• Pragmatic about what a lean engineering org actually needs versus what a 500-person org would do. You optimize for speed and clarity, not process.

• Experience with our stack: Cloudflare, GCP, Spanner, Postgres, ClickHouse, Vercel, or TypeScript-heavy environments.

• Background at infrastructure-native companies.

• Existing user of OpenRouter, or active side projects in AI infrastructure, edge compute, or developer tooling.

• Experience managing adjacent domains like security or developer experience alongside core platform work.

The base salary for this full-time position in the United States, spanning multiple internal levels depending on qualifications, ranges between $245,000 to $295,000 plus benefits & equity. Compensation for internationally based candidates will vary to reflect local market conditions.

If you don't think you meet all of the criteria below but still are interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we're looking for someone who is excited to join the team.