Forward Deployed Engineer at OpenRouter leads post-sales technical onboarding: integrating customers' apps with the AI inference API, debugging API/SDK and routing issues, advising on model selection, latency and cost tradeoffs, and running architecture and enablement sessions. Work is largely on-site with customers in the SF Bay Area.
You will lead post-sales technical onboarding and help customers implement, adopt, and scale AI inference deployments. You will debug integrations, advise on model and routing decisions, run architecture and enablement sessions, and translate customer feedback into practical improvements. You will regularly work from customer offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and travel as needed.
Responsibilities
Lead technical onboarding from kickoff through production usage
Define customer success plans, implementation milestones, and adoption goals
Help customers integrate APIs into 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 playbooks
Recommend model, provider, routing, fallback, caching, and cost-optimization strategies
Analyze usage patterns to improve adoption, reliability, cost, and workload expansion
Run technical working sessions, integration reviews, architecture discussions, and developer enablement sessions
Surface customer feedback, feature requests, integration blockers, and product gaps
Contribute to knowledge bases, onboarding materials, and best practices
Requirements
4+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role
Software engineering fundamentals and ability to read, write, and debug production-quality code
Experience with APIs, SDKs, cloud infrastructure, developer platforms, or AI/ML infrastructure
Familiarity with LLMs, inference, model evaluation, prompt engineering, agents, latency and cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns
Ability to diagnose problems and design practical solutions with developers and engineering leaders
Written and verbal communication skills
Ability to work on-site with customers regularly and travel to customer sites as needed