Partner Development Manager, Provider Ecosystem

As the Manager of Ecosystem Partnerships (Provider Supply), you'll own and execute OpenRouter’s strategy for growing and managing our global network of LLM and inference providers. You will be the company’s first supply-side partnerships hire and will build the foundational programs that ensure OpenRouter has the industry's most comprehensive, reliable, and compliant model ecosystem.

You'll manage relationships with our highest-impact model and infrastructure partners, negotiate commercial and technical agreements, ensure billing and SLA accuracy, enforce data policy compliance, and drive the expansion of new providers and model families. This role is deeply cross-functional—working closely with Product, Engineering, Security, Legal, and Finance to make OpenRouter the platform of choice for providers looking to scale distribution and revenue.

You will shape the future of OpenRouter’s supply ecosystem, directly influencing product quality, reliability, economics, and overall platform competitiveness.

• 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.

• 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.