Forward Deployed Engineer
$220k - $260k • San Francisco Bay Area, California • FullTime
Posted 4mo ago
Job Location
San Francisco Bay Area, California
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Employment Type
FullTime
Categories
AI Engineer
About the job
OpenRouter is seeking a Forward Deployed Engineer to join their post-sales team. This role is crucial for ensuring customers successfully implement, adopt, and scale the OpenRouter platform. You will work at the intersection of customer success, support, customer engineering, product, and developer relations, directly assisting customers after the sale to integrate OpenRouter into their production systems, optimize their inference architecture, and expand usage. The position requires deep, hands-on engagement with developers, including debugging integrations, designing implementation paths, advising on model and routing strategies, and translating customer learnings into product feedback. The ideal candidate is technically adept, commercially aware, and proactive in driving customer success from initial implementation to scaled production usage.
Responsibilities
- Lead technical onboarding for new customers, guiding them from kickoff to production usage.
- Partner with Customer Success Managers and Account Executives to define success plans and adoption goals.
- Assist customers in integrating OpenRouter into their applications, workflows, and infrastructure.
- Troubleshoot issues related to APIs, SDKs, model selection, routing, latency, and deployment.
- Develop implementation guides, reference architectures, code examples, and playbooks.
- Understand customer AI use cases, application architecture, and inference goals.
- Recommend strategies for model selection, provider choice, routing, fallback, caching, and cost optimization.
- Analyze usage patterns to identify opportunities for adoption, reliability improvements, and cost reduction.
- Facilitate customer evaluation of models and providers based on various requirements.
- Drive customer adoption from initial API usage to broader production deployment.
- Build strong technical relationships with customer development and engineering teams.
- Conduct technical working sessions, integration reviews, and developer enablement sessions.
- Serve as a trusted technical advisor for customers building AI-native products and LLM workflows.
- Translate complex technical concepts for both developers and business stakeholders.
- Advocate for developer needs internally and contribute to improving the customer implementation experience.
- Collaborate with Customer Success to enhance retention and adoption.
- Partner with Sales on technical expansion opportunities.
- Work with Product and Engineering to relay customer feedback, feature requests, and product gaps.
- Contribute to internal knowledge bases, playbooks, and best practices.
- Help define standards for excellent post-sales technical engagement.
Requirements
- 4+ years of experience in a technical customer-facing role (e.g., Forward Deployed Engineer, Solutions Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager, Developer Advocate, Customer Engineer).
- Strong software engineering fundamentals with the 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/cost tradeoffs, and production AI application patterns.
- Ability to diagnose problems and design practical solutions in collaboration with developers and engineering leaders.
- Strong customer focus, with the ability to drive outcomes, manage ambiguity, and build trust.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills, capable of explaining technical topics to diverse audiences.
- High sense of ownership, bias for action, and comfort in a fast-paced startup environment.
- Ability to be on-site with customers regularly and travel as needed.