Software Engineer, Platform
OpenRouter is hiring a Software Engineer, Platform for a remote role open to applicants in United States. It pays $215k-$285k a year and Level rates it ; you can apply on OpenRouter.
Level's read on this job
- Level rates this software engineer role Builds AI ●●●●: the job is building AI systems.
- Pay on this posting starts 28% higher than the typical software engineer posting on Level.
- This is listed as a remote role.
- The posting mentions Cloudflare, Google Cloud and Vercel among its tools and skills.
- OpenRouter has 26 other open roles on Level.
AI in this role
Scale and operate core cloud infrastructure and data layers routing and serving millions of LLM requests daily.
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.
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.
How we rate this
Software Engineer, Platform at OpenRouter rates 85 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Builds AI (AI Level 4 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.
Builds AI. The job is building AI systems.
- ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
- ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
- ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
- ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39
Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.
Prepare for this job
Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.
Skills and AI tools this role asks for
Also common in software engineer jobs at this level
Pay
- This job starts at
- $215k
- Typical software engineer job
- $168k
This posting starts 28% above the typical software engineer job. See software engineer jobs
Questions you could be asked
- Tell me about a project where infrastructure was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where platform engineering was part of your work. What did you do?
- Tell me about a project where distributed systems was part of your work. What did you do?
- What's a project where you used Cloudflare hands-on?
- Walk me through how you've used Google Cloud in your day-to-day work.
Adapt your resume
- List these exact terms on your resume: Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Distributed Systems, Cloudflare, and Google Cloud. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
- Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
- Lead with what you built, trained or shipped. This role is judged on the AI system itself, not the tools around it.
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