Software Engineer, Platform
- Salary
- $215K - $285K
- Level
- Mid
- Work type
- Remote · US only
Not stated in the posting: visa.
Open. First seen 2 October 2026.
About the role
About OpenRouter
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.
OpenRouter's standard text
As enterprise adoption of AI accelerates, OpenRouter sits at the center of how organizations operationalize LLMs across research, product, and production workloads.
About the Role
We're hiring a Software Engineer on our Platform team to own and scale the systems that route and serve millions of LLM requests every day. The business is growing at an unbelievable pace and we need help to ensure our platform can keep up. You'll work alongside a small team of engineers on owning our infrastructure, datastores, CI/CD pipeline and everything else at OpenRouter is built on. This is a hands-on IC role with broad surface area and little process between you and shipping.
What You'll Do
- Own and evolve our edge and cloud infrastructure across Cloudflare, Google Cloud, and Vercel.
- Scale and operate our data layer including Spanner, ClickHouse, and Postgres.
- Ensure we are optimizing for performance when serving LLM inference as traffic rapidly grows.
- Partner with engineering leadership on capacity, reliability, and cost across the routing layer, with ownership of the systems carrying production traffic.
- Set the bar and playbook for how we run infrastructure and operations as the team grows — tooling, observability, on-call, and the patterns other engineers build against.
What We're Looking For
- 5+ years building and operating production infrastructure at companies where uptime, latency, and cost matter.
- Proven experience with cloud platforms (GCP, AWS, Azure) and edge-first serverless platforms (e.g. Cloudflare Workers)
- Deep expertise in operating large scale databases (e.g Postgres, Spanner, etc).
- A full-stack TypeScript shop won't faze you; you can move across the stack when the platform needs it.
- High agency and a bias toward action. You don't wait for tickets — you see the bottleneck and fix it.
- AI-forward in your workflow. You use coding agents, MCPs, and LLMs heavily and have opinions about what works.
- Pragmatic about tradeoffs between speed and simplicity.
Nice to Have
- Existing user of OpenRouter, or active side projects in AI products/infrastructure or developer tooling.
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.
What this role asks for
In most of OpenRouter's ads
LLM
Named in most of its open postings, whatever the role.
95% of this description is written for the role. The rest is OpenRouter's standard text, folded away below.
Read against OpenRouter's other open postings on this site.
The team: Engineering HIRES STEADILY
This role is one of 8 open in Engineering. 4 were posted in the last 30 days and the oldest in January: a team that hires all year rather than one being built.
WHAT THE TEAM WORKS WITH, ACROSS ITS POSTINGS
LLM (8 of 8), TypeScript (6 of 8), ClickHouse (4 of 8), Cloudflare (3 of 8), GCP (3 of 8), JavaScript (3 of 8), PostgreSQL (3 of 8)
OTHER ROLES ON THIS TEAM
- Site Reliability Engineer, Provider Operations posted Oct 13
- Software Engineer, Ori posted Oct 6
- Engineering Manager, Provider Ecosystem posted Sep 28
- Software Engineer, Trust & Safety posted Sep 21
- Community Lead, Developer Relations posted Sep 1
- Software Engineer, Enterprise posted Apr 23
- AI Provider Operations & Support Engineer posted Jan 29
From the team and dates on OpenRouter's own job board.
Salary context
10 other open postings titled Software Engineer, Platform state a salary: median USD 180,000 to USD 337,500 a year.
See Software Engineer salaries in Remote →
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