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 Every token that flows through OpenRouter is a financial event. Billions of requests run across hundreds of models and dozens of providers, and each request carries its own cost, price, discount and contract terms. Behind the inference engine sits a money engine: metering, pricing, invoicing, credits, payments, payouts and the ledger that ties it all together. We're hiring our first engineer to envision, build and own the dollar+token value capture engine behind OpenRouter's leading inference gateway, marketplace and rapidly growing suite of agentic products. You will be responsible for the robust and flexible platform that lets the business sell any pricing model it can dream up. If you come from fintech and have a passion for financial engineering, this is your chance to reimagine an AI-first, agentic Money Platform from the ground up.
What You’ll Do
- Flexible pricing and contract terms. Any commitment size, BYOK pricing, overages, platform fees and per-seat pricing. Sales and CS should be able to test new deals without an engineer.
- Automate quote-to-cash. Take a signed contract straight to a provisioned, correctly billed customer with no manual uploads. Handle POC and production contracts as separate flows. Build credit transfers at onboarding and self-serve credit grants for CS into our own tools.
- Define the source of truth. Financial core that owns fees, plans and entitlements. Establish robust data architecture for internal and customer reporting.
- Own usage → revenue. Every completed request is metered, priced and recorded exactly once, across our streaming spend-tracking pipeline and usage records. Reconcile what we served against what we charged.
- Own billing, payments & collections. That means invoicing, prepaid credits, auto top-ups, refunds, tax/VAT, POs and spend-against-commitment tracking. It also covers the Stripe integration, failed-payment recovery and overdue-invoice collections.
- Build the ledger, AP & reconciliation. Build a double-entry ledger as the financial system of record. Automate reconciliation across Postgres, Stripe, billing and usage data. Own provider settlements and payables, and hand Finance close-ready numbers.
- Work cross-functionally. Partner closely with the Provider team on usage tracking, per-generation cost attribution and provider pricing/discounts, and with the Trust & Safety team on payments fraud and abuse prevention.
- Treat correctness and controls as features. The system ensures idempotency of financial transactions, anomaly detection, auditability and least-privilege access for finance tools. Any dollar that can't be explained is a bug.
What We’re Looking For
- 5+ years building production financial systems: billing, payments, ledgers or revenue infrastructure, at a fintech or a usage-based SaaS company.
- Deep fluency in money-correctness patterns: idempotency, double-entry accounting, exactly-once event processing, reconciliation and safe migrations of financial data.
- Hands-on experience with Stripe (or similar processors) and a billing/invoicing platform, including contract, subscription and usage-based models.
- Strong TypeScript and SQL. Comfortable with Postgres and analytical stores (ClickHouse or similar) at high event volume.
- Working knowledge of accounting: AR/AP, revenue recognition, deferred revenue, month-end close. You can talk with Finance in their language.
- You work well across teams. You'll partner daily with Provider, Trust & Safety, Sales, CS and Finance, and turn messy business asks into clean systems.
- High agency and AI-forward. You use coding agents daily and like automating away manual finance ops.
Nice to Haves
- You've built usage-based, hybrid or seat-based billing at scale.
- Experience with streaming data pipelines (e.g. Dataflow, Spanner, Kafka) for metering.
- Experience with payments fraud and risk systems (e.g. Stripe Radar).
- Experience with multi-currency, sales tax/VAT or global payment methods.
- You've helped get financial systems ready for an audit.
- You're an existing OpenRouter user, or have built projects in AI 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.
Sourced from the a16z Speedrun talent network — apply on Speedrun.