Solutions Architect

About the Role

As a Solutions Architect, you'll be the technical backbone of our sales organization - partnering with Business Development Managers and Product Managers to translate complex customer requirements into winning technical strategy. You'll work directly with engineering, infrastructure, and platform teams at our largest prospects and customers, helping them understand how to architect, integrate, and scale their LLM usage on OpenRouter.

This is a hands-on, customer-facing technical role. You'll run technical discovery, lead architecture conversations, build and support proofs of concept, and be the trusted technical voice in complex, multi-stakeholder deals - while also feeding what you learn back into Product and Engineering to make OpenRouter better.

What You'll Do

• Partner with Business Development Managers and Product Managers on strategic partnership opportunities, leading technical discovery, solution design, and architecture discussions with customer engineering and infrastructure teams.
• Run technical discovery with partner product and engineering teams, map their product to our integration patterns, and present the options with honest tradeoffs.
• Capture partner requirements and get launch-blocking needs, scale needs, and compliance needs on paper before commercial terms are agreed
• Turn partner requirements into integration specs our engineering team builds from
• Keep a single current list of open technical questions and decisions for every active partner deal, and chase them to resolution.
• Stand up working integrations with design partners, debug in real time, and drive to a clear technical yes.
• Build reference architectures, integration guides, and demo environments so future partner integrations take a fraction of the effort of the first.
• Work closely with Product, Engineering, and Customer Engineering to bring customer and market signal back into the roadmap, and to make sure partner feedback shapes what we build next.
• Stay technically sharp. Keep pace with the fast-evolving LLM landscape - new models, providers, infrastructure patterns, and the tools your customers are already using.

What We're Looking for

• 7+ years in a technical, partner- or customer-facing role (solutions architect, partner engineer, sales engineer, forward-deployed engineer) at an API-first or developer infrastructure company.
• Hands-on depth in API platform design: authentication and authorization (OAuth 2.0, PKCE, token exchange, API key management), multi-tenancy, rate limiting, webhooks, and usage metering.
• Experience designing embedded or platform integrations where account ownership, billing, and data flows were part of the design.
• A track record of writing technical specs that engineers actually built from.
• Comfortable leading a call with a senior technical leaders internally and externally
• Strong written communication. A large part of this job is clear documents.
• Genuine technical curiosity about OpenRouter and our partner’s products and the AI tools and infrastructure ecosystem more broadly.

Nice to Haves

• Experience at an API or platform company with a partner or embed program
• Familiarity with gateways and proxies, trust and safety or abuse systems, or billing and metering infrastructure.
• Hands-on time with LLM APIs, agents, MCP, or multi-provider routing.
• Personal projects involving AI agents, self-hosted models, or infrastructure tinkering.

Additional information

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.