• 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.