Research Scientist

OpenRouter Inc.

Job Overview

Location

Remote (US)

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• As a Research Scientist, you will conduct deep, original research that advances how the world understands, evaluates, and routes large language models.
• You'll work with one of the richest datasets in AI: billions of LLM generations spanning every major model, provider, and use case.
• You will own and pursue a research agenda: designing experiments, developing evaluation frameworks, and producing work that shapes how models are compared, selected, and deployed.
• Your findings will inform OpenRouter's routing intelligence, public rankings, and the broader AI discourse.
• Success in this role is measured by the quality and impact of your research, not by shipping production code or building dashboards.
• You'll collaborate with product and engineering teams, but your primary focus is depth and rigor.
• You will own and pursue a research agenda focused on LLM evaluation, model quality, routing optimization, and AI usage patterns, contributing original insights that advance the field.
• Design novel evaluation frameworks and benchmarks that go beyond standard leaderboards, using real-world generation data to capture how models actually perform across tasks and contexts.
• Conduct large-scale empirical studies on LLM behavior: how models compare across providers, how performance changes over time, and how usage patterns reveal strengths and weaknesses.
• Develop the statistical and mathematical foundations behind our routing systems, building the models and heuristics that power intelligent provider and model selection.
• Identify opportunities to apply research findings to feed back into OpenRouter's product and platform.
• Collaborate with external researchers, model providers, and the open-source community to advance shared understanding of LLM capabilities and limitations.
• Work with product and engineering teams to translate research findings into improvements to OpenRouter's platform, without being constrained to a shipping cadence.

🎯 Requirements

• MS or PhD in a quantitative field (machine learning, statistics, computer science, mathematics, computational linguistics, or similar).
• Track record of original research, demonstrated by first-author publications, significant open-source contributions, or equivalent impact in industry research.
• Deep expertise in statistics, experimental design, and causal inference.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Proficiency in SQL for working with large-scale analytical databases.
• Hands-on experience with modern ML/NLP techniques such as LLM evaluation, fine-tuning, embeddings, classification, or reinforcement learning from human feedback.

🏖️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and benefits package.
• Opportunity to work with a leading AI routing and infrastructure layer.
• Collaborative and dynamic work environment.

Skills & Technologies

Python

Remote

Degree Required

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OpenRouter Inc.

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About OpenRouter Inc.

OpenRouter operates a unified API and routing platform that lets developers send requests to dozens of large-language-model providers—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, open-source models and more—through a single endpoint. The service automatically handles authentication, quota management, load balancing, cost tracking and failover across vendors, while exposing standardized parameters and pricing. Users can switch or combine models without changing code, compare performance and cost in real time, and pay for all providers with a single account. The company also offers usage analytics, prompt caching and enterprise controls, positioning itself as an infrastructure layer for teams building AI-powered products.

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