Role description
OpenRouterAbout OpenRouter
OpenRouter is the leading AI routing and infrastructure layer that developers and enterprises use to access, manage, and optimize their AI use across models and providers. We help our customers avoid lock-in, capacity constraints, and unnecessary cost, giving them the flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and adapt as models evolve.
OpenRouter sits at the center of how developers and organizations discover, evaluate, integrate, and operate the world’s leading open and proprietary models, routing billions of tokens across dozens of model labs and inference providers every day.
About the Role
We’re hiring a Product Manager for OpenRouter’s marketplace between developers and inference providers. We need your help as we transform our routing layer into a liquid marketplace that raises the quality floor for the entire ecosystem and opens up new ways to buy and sell inference.
You’ll drive the marketplace mechanics, provider-facing products, and economic incentives that match supply and demand. Alongside the engineering, operations, and partnerships teams, you’ll launch new market structures (like auctions, priority lanes, and dynamic pricing), build the benchmarks and diagnostics that help providers compete for traffic, and turn manual onboarding and operations into self-serve APIs. The features you’ll launch will impact the entire inference ecosystem.
This role is for a technical product builder who thinks in market incentives, unit economics, and distributed systems, and who works shoulder-to-shoulder with engineers to ship clean, durable infrastructure.
What You’ll Do
Own the Provider Marketplace roadmap, from the provider dashboard, self-serve APIs, and onboarding pipelines to the prioritization, pricing, and quality mechanisms that govern traffic across the network.
Launch new market primitives. Design, test, and scale new ways to match inference supply and demand, including auctions, committed capacity, and dynamic pricing.
Shape the buyer and provider product experience. Build the demand-side buying controls and supply-side capacity tools required to make new markets liquid and easy to adopt.
Define inference prioritization and service tiers. Structure priority lanes, dedicated enterprise capacity, and flex tiers across customer reliability, provider margins, and OpenRouter’s business model.
Raise the provider quality floor. Build automated feedback loops (continuous evaluations, routing scorecards, and real-time failure diagnostics) so providers see why they win or lose traffic and fix regressions without filing a ticket.
Scale supply through self-serve product. Partner with Engineering, Provider Development, and Provider Operations to turn manual onboarding, model staging, pricing updates, and health checks into self-serve APIs.
Run the marketplace on data. Dig into request logs, routing metrics, and unit economics to find unmet demand, stranded capacity, or broken incentives, and turn those findings into crisp specs and shipped product.
What We’re Looking For
5+ years of product management, technical founder, or marketplace systems experience building products where algorithmic decision-making, economics, and infrastructure meet.
Experience on a two-sided marketplace, exchange, or price matching engine. You have worked on a scaled marketplace (such as commerce seller ecosystems, cloud compute markets, ad exchanges, or logistics marketplaces) and understand liquidity, price discovery, supply-demand balancing, and trust systems.
Technical background and engineering partnership. You have prior software engineering experience, studied Computer Science, or have equivalent technical depth. You understand API design, how to design around engineering constraints, and partner closely with engineers to scope, sequence, and ship complex projects iteratively.
Fluency with LLM inference stacks. You understand what happens when an inference request hits a provider (such as caching behavior, batching, and quantization decisions that drive cost vs. performance tradeoffs) so you can hold your own with lab and inference provider engineers.
Hands-on builder with code, data, and AI agents. You use coding agents daily to analyze data, prototype workflows, and validate specs before asking for engineering time.
Strong commercial and economic instincts. You enjoy digging into how each layer of the inference stack makes money. You know how to modeling margin and capacity tradeoffs, while designing incentives where customers, providers, and the platform all win.
High agency, velocity, and written clarity. You turn messy technical and economic problems into clear written strategies, talk directly to users and partners, cut scope intelligently, and ship fast.
Nice to Have
Background at an inference provider, AI lab, neo-cloud, or GPU cloud, or building infrastructure for model serving and routing.
Hands-on work designing auction mechanisms, spot or batch compute markets, SLA tiers, or dynamic pricing models.
Track record building B2B seller or partner tooling, self-serve onboarding funnels, and partner analytics dashboards.
If you don’t think you meet all of the criteria above but are still interested in the job, please apply. Nobody checks every box, and we’re looking for someone excited to join the team.