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OpenRouter, Inc · 1 month ago

Partner Development Manager, Provider Ecosystem

United States

Full-time

Remote

Senior Level, Lead/Staff

8+ years exp

OpenRouter is seeking a Manager of Ecosystem Partnerships to lead the strategy for growing and managing their global network of LLM and inference providers. This role involves building foundational programs, managing relationships with key providers, and ensuring compliance and billing accuracy to enhance the platform's competitiveness.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)Information TechnologySoftware

Responsibilities

Develop and own the strategy for sourcing, prioritizing, and onboarding new model providers, inference services, and accelerator-based platforms

Evaluate provider technical capabilities, performance characteristics, pricing, and strategic relevance to determine partnership fit

Build a high-quality pipeline of emerging model developers, cloud inference platforms, and GPU/ASIC providers to expand OpenRouter’s supply diversity

Manage end-to-end relationships with key providers, including roadmap collaboration, integration planning, pricing reviews, and quarterly business reviews

Partner with Engineering and Product to ensure smooth technical integration, metadata accuracy, reliability standards, and go-to-market alignment

Advocate for provider needs while balancing platform-wide performance, economics, and compliance considerations

Build scalable compliance programs that ensure providers meet OpenRouter’s data handling standards (no-train/no-retain, ZDR, SOC2/ISO alignment, GDPR, TPRM requirements)

Establish recurring compliance reviews, attestations, breach escalation pathways, and risk classifications

Collaborate with Legal and Security to maintain enforceable data governance across all provider agreements

Develop systems to identify billing discrepancies, token miscounts, rate-card inconsistencies, and revenue leakage

Partner with Finance to maintain accurate provider rate cards, rev-share structures, and payout workflows

Lead enforcement of provider SLAs, including uptime, latency, throughput, and error rate standards—ensuring credits or remedies are applied as required

Build repeatable audit processes and dashboards to maintain billing integrity across the provider ecosystem

Lead negotiation of complex provider partnerships involving pricing, consumption economics, data privacy, reliability commitments, and integration requirements

Structure agreements that balance mutual value creation while protecting OpenRouter’s reliability, margin, and compliance obligations

Build scalable onboarding documentation and processes to reduce friction for future provider integrations

Collaborate with Product and Engineering to influence provider-facing roadmap decisions, model routing logic, and supply expansion

Work with Growth, Support, and Marketing to communicate provider changes, outages, launches, and performance improvements

Maintain deep visibility into the AI/ML and inference ecosystem—emerging models, hardware accelerators, competitive pricing dynamics, and market shifts

Qualification

Partnerships managementTechnical integrationsNegotiation skillsData governance expertiseAnalytical skillsStrategic thinkingCommunication skills

Required

8+ years in partnerships, business development, or strategic alliances, with 3–5+ years leading supply-side or ecosystem partnerships programs

Strong understanding of technical integrations, including API patterns, authentication, routing, data flows, rate limiting, and reliability metrics

Expertise in negotiating agreements involving data governance, SLAs, token or usage-based pricing, compliance requirements, and integration commitments

Highly analytical—comfortable digging into billing logs, token counts, performance metrics, and error patterns to identify discrepancies or opportunities

Strategic thinker with the ability to operate from 0 to 1 while simultaneously managing day-to-day partner execution

Excellent communicator capable of influencing senior technical and commercial stakeholders