AI Provider Operations Engineer — Lead LLM Model Launches

OpenRouter, Inc; United States; On-site; USD 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

OpenRouter seeks an AI-focused candidate to own model launches and provider onboarding, bringing new models to market and guiding provider integrations. You’ll work with labs and partners across the AI ecosystem, building tools and playbooks that accelerate onboarding and deployments.

The role emphasizes hands-on work with inference APIs, TS/JS and Python, and a bias toward shipping high-impact features for developers integrating LLMs.

Qualifications

• Experience: 2-3 years at a startup, software engineering, product ops, or similar.
• Technical Skills: Comfortable building with inference APIs, including Chat Completions, Responses, and/or Messages API; can read API docs and troubleshoot with logs/cURL/Postman.
• Mindset: Ambitious owner, fast learner, bias to ship. Passionate about AI and developer experience.
• Education: CS/Engineering degree is a plus, not required with demonstrated technical aptitude.

Responsibilities

• Tooling for benchmarks, onboarding and internal operations (~60%)
• Build internal tools to help speed up the model onboarding process
• Build internal evals to quickly evaluate models and endpoints
• Document internal processes and prime them for automation
• Model Launches & Provider Partnerships (~40%)
• Run end-to-end launch playbooks for various model types (text, audio, image, audio, video, embeddings, and rerankers): scoping, test plans, latency/quality checks, pricing & quotas, docs, and announcement assets.
• Coordinate with model providers to integrate, QA, and hit ship dates.
• Maintain clear versioning and release notes; manage deprecations and migrations.

Skills

TypeScript/JavaScript

Python

Startup experience

Education

CS/Engineering degree (a plus)

Tools

cURL

Postman

API docs reading

Job description

OpenRouter seeks an AI-focused candidate to own model launches and provider onboarding, bringing new models to market and guiding provider integrations. You’ll work with labs and partners across the AI ecosystem, building tools and playbooks that accelerate onboarding and deployments.

The role emphasizes hands-on work with inference APIs, TS/JS and Python, and a bias toward shipping high-impact features for developers integrating LLMs.