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Software Engineer, Trust & Safety

OpenRouter, Remote (US)

Posted pay

$215K–$285K

a year

Location: Remote (US)
Work type: Remote
Level: Not given
Experience: 4+ years
Skills in the job text: SQL
TypeScript
React
BigQuery
ClickHouse
Next.js
Posted: Sep 21, 2026
Last check: 9 h ago
Job type: Software engineering

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OpenRouter

About OpenRouter: funding, hiring and pay

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The role

We’re hiring a Software Engineer on our Trust & Safety team to own the detection, enforcement, and review systems that keep abuse, fraud, malicious users and illegal content off the platform. Millions of LLM requests and a large volume of payments flow through OpenRouter every day, and maintaining the safety, integrity, and trust of our platform is a priority. You’ll build the systems that detect abuse and fraud, the heuristics for automated action and abuse mitigation, the tooling our reviewers act through, and the guardrails that keep us from acting on the wrong account.

You will be responsible for proactive abuse-prevention architecture for a new layer of the AI stack while the abuse patterns are still being invented. The threat model changes quickly, and the systems you build have to catch novel abuse without adding friction for the legitimate developers and enterprises who use our platform. Done well, this work protects millions of daily requests, our provider relationships, and the trust that enterprises place in OpenRouter.

This is a hands-on IC role with broad surface area spanning the inference path, the payments path, internal review tooling, and the data platform underneath all of it. There is little process between you and shipping, and your work has direct consequences for real users, so the bar for judgment is high.

What you will do

Build and operate technical systems across signup, payments, and usage to detect abuse and fraud early.
Own the technical enforcement pipeline end to end, from detection proposing a candidate to a human reviewing it to restrictions landing across our systems.
Build the internal tools that support investigation and enforcement decision-making. This involves building case queues, evidence summaries, bulk review and enactment, and alerting mechanisms to trigger investigations.
Ship technical solutions for content safety on the inference path: illegal content detection and reporting, the KYC systems or external intelligence sources to allow us to more efficiently and proactively detect and stop fraud and abuse.
Help make abuse uneconomical by building systems, tools, and heuristics for quick detection and scalable enforcement.
Help investigate incidents directly in the data and build the analytics plane so we can quickly establish what happened, size the pattern, and separate real abuse from a false-positive cluster.
Build defensible monitoring for risk, abuse spikes, and fraud, all while reducing false positives.
Set the technical direction for how we prevent abuse as the platform grows and evolves, and define the patterns other engineers build against.
Work with data scientists on feature exploration and training of risk and abuse ML models

What you need

4+ years building and operating production systems, ideally including work in trust & safety, fraud, payments risk, security, or anti-abuse.
Proficient in React, TypeScript, Next.js, and JS runtimes.
Ability to write SQL against large event datasets and reason about base rates, precision and recall, and the cost of a wrong decision.
Sound judgment when working with incomplete evidence.
High agency and a bias toward action; spotting problems, iterating, and shipping without waiting for tickets.
AI-forward in your workflow, using coding agents often, finding interesting ways to automate your work, and holding opinions about what works and what doesn't.
Comfortable in a small, fast-moving environment where boundaries between teams are intentionally fluid.
Discretion and resilience, since parts of this role may involve reviewing or discussing disturbing content and handling sensitive user data.
Strong written and verbal communication, able to explain incident findings, detection rules, and systems to a range of audiences.
Motivated by adversarial problems, where the counterparty adapts to whatever you ship and the work keeps evolving.

Nice to have

Experience with payments fraud tooling (Stripe Radar, chargeback and dispute flows, crypto payment risk), or with identity and KYC systems.
Experience with LLM-specific abuse: jailbreaks, prompt injection, key theft and resale, shared or scraped credentials, automated account farming.
Experience operating large scale analytical datastores (e.g. ClickHouse, BigQuery) and observability platforms.
Familiarity with the reporting and compliance obligations that come with hosted AI, including illegal content reporting and model provider policy requirements.
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.

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.

Read the job posting on the OpenRouter site

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Source: the OpenRouter Ashby job board. We last checked this job 9 h ago. We first saw it 4 days ago. A job on a job board does not always mean that the team interviews people now. We found this job board in a public list. We did not yet compare it with the careers page of the company.

Company facts

Money raised: $153MSum of funding rounds on record
Newest round: Series BMay 28, 2026

Funding records can have errors and can be missing. The company page has the links.

OpenRouter

Open tech jobs: 13
With posted pay: 77%
Median posted base: $215K–$285K

About OpenRouter: funding, hiring and pay

Compared with similar jobs

This base pay is above the median for software engineering jobs that are remote in the US with no level in the job title.

Median: $165K a year
Other jobs in the group: 846

We compare the middle of each posted range. This is base pay as posted. The group does not include this job.