Engineering Manager, Platform

OpenRouter

About The Position

OpenRouter is seeking an Engineering Manager for its Platform team. This team is responsible for the core infrastructure that supports OpenRouter's operations, including the layer that handles millions of LLM requests daily. The role is described as hands-on leadership, requiring the manager to not only lead and grow the team but also to be actively involved in technical tasks such as coding, architectural decisions, and debugging production issues. The position reports to the CEO, and the manager will collaborate with engineering leadership on strategic priorities and platform development as OpenRouter scales.

Requirements

4+ years of engineering management experience, with at least one instance of building or scaling a team during rapid growth.
Strong technical foundation in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related field, with an understanding of systems-level trade-offs (edge compute, distributed systems, databases, security, cloud infrastructure).
Hands-on technical capability, including writing code and using AI-assisted development tools.
Proven ability to recruit and retain strong engineers.
High level of initiative and clear communication skills; ability to identify priorities, create plans, and drive them forward.
Pragmatic approach to managing a lean engineering organization, optimizing for speed and clarity over excessive process.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Cloudflare, GCP, Spanner, Postgres, ClickHouse, Vercel, or TypeScript-heavy environments.
Background in infrastructure-native companies.
Existing user of OpenRouter, or active side projects in AI infrastructure, edge compute, or developer tooling.
Experience managing adjacent domains such as security or developer experience alongside core platform work.

Responsibilities

Build and lead the platform team, including hiring engineers, setting the team's pace, and fostering an environment where engineers want to stay and grow.
Remain hands-on by coding, reviewing architecture decisions, and actively participating in the technical details of the systems owned by the team.
Define the technical direction for the platform, understanding and balancing trade-offs across edge, cloud, and data infrastructure.
Manage and resolve technical challenges, resourcing gaps, or prioritization issues when projects face obstacles or failures.
Collaborate with engineering leadership on capacity, reliability, and cost management for the routing layer, taking ownership of systems handling production traffic.
Represent the platform team's needs and priorities to the wider organization, advocating for investments and making direct cases to leadership.