Product Manager, OpenRouter Connect - OpenRouter

About OpenRouter

OpenRouter is the leading AI routing and infrastructure layer, empowering developers and enterprises to access, manage, and optimize their AI usage across various models and providers. We help customers avoid lock-in, capacity constraints, and unnecessary costs, providing flexibility to move fast, scale confidently, and stay future-proof as models evolve. We offer a single control plane for AI, allowing users to set policy, manage spend, and track usage, cost, and performance across every model and provider.

OpenRouter is central to how organizations discover, evaluate, integrate, and operate the world’s leading open and proprietary models. Increasingly, this access extends to end-users through platforms that leverage OpenRouter as their managed inference layer.

About the Role: Product Manager, OpenRouter Connect

We are seeking the first Product Manager for OpenRouter Connect. Connect is designed to open a new growth channel by enabling partners to offer multi-model inference to their customers directly within their own products. This role involves building a "platform for platforms," allowing any company whose customers require inference to integrate and distribute it with the necessary controls and observability for both partners and their end-customers. Connect empowers enterprise and developer tools to provide a full model catalog to their users without having to build inference, policy enforcement, or usage metering themselves.

You will own the Connect product end-to-end, collaborating closely with engineering, design, partnerships, and go-to-market teams. A significant part of your role will involve engaging with partners to understand their needs for serving their customers and translating these insights into a comprehensive roadmap. You will be responsible for defining the abstractions that transform Connect into a robust product, rather than a series of one-off integrations.

This role is ideal for individuals who have built platform or API products that other companies build upon, have navigated the identity, policy, and billing complexities of multi-tenant systems, and understand the distinction between an integration a partner can self-serve quickly versus one that causes delays.

What You’ll Do

• Own the Connect roadmap end-to-end: Drive prioritization and requirements definition across partner integration and onboarding, provisioning APIs, controls and guardrails needed per customer and per end-user, and usage visibility and billing.
• Set the strategy: Determine and prioritize target partner segments, define competitive positioning for each, and establish goals for Connect across partner and end-user activation, engagement, and retention.
• Work directly with design partners: Participate in prospect interest and integration calls, unblock their engineers, and gather partner and end-customer needs to inform the roadmap.
• Collaborate with engineering and design to ship: Make scope and sequencing decisions to deliver quickly, iteratively, and with a high bar for quality and developer experience. Ensure Connect is built on reusable abstractions, not one-off integrations.
• Push platform gaps back into the core: Identify and drive missing management endpoints, analytics dimensions, or guardrail primitives from Connect into the core OpenRouter product, benefiting all customers.
• Shape the commercial model with go-to-market: Partner with Partnerships and Finance teams to develop a business model and terms that create a win-win-win scenario for partners, their end customers, and OpenRouter.

What We’re Looking For

• 5+ years of product management or founder experience building platform, API, or infrastructure products that other companies' engineers build on.
• Experience shipping partner-delivered, multi-tenant products: You have experience with another company integrating, white-labeling, or reselling what you built (B2B2B or B2B2Dev), and you've addressed the tenant, identity, and billing challenges inherent in such systems.
• A zero-to-one track record: You have successfully taken a product from design partners to general availability and are comfortable with the ambiguity, difficult tradeoffs, and tight feedback loops of early-stage product development.
• High agency and a bias toward action: You proactively engage with partners, write clear specifications, ship products, and iterate rapidly within a fast-paced team with fluid boundaries. You communicate clearly and frequently in writing.
• Strong technical judgment: You can read API specifications, use SDKs yourself, review observability and product metrics, and hold strong opinions on customer-facing API surfaces, authentication models, partner integrations, usage metering, and tenant isolation.

Nice to Have

• Experience at a developer platform, LLM ops, or AI gateway company, or building embedded/OEM offerings for infrastructure products.
• Familiarity with enterprise customer controls, such as access, budget, and DLP management, needed by partners.
• Experience-informed opinions on tenant isolation, delegated administration, end-user identity, and per-tenant policy.
• Background in usage-based billing and reporting, including experience with metering, invoicing, or revenue share, and understanding the needs of finance teams on both sides of a partnership.
• Existing user of OpenRouter or hands-on familiarity with the model and provider ecosystem.

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.