Partner Development Manager, Provider Ecosystem

8+ years in partnerships, business development, or strategic alliances. 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. Strategic thinker with ability to operate from 0 to 1 while managing day-to-day partner execution. Excellent communicator capable of influencing senior technical and commercial stakeholders.

Develop and own strategy for sourcing, prioritizing, and onboarding new model providers. Evaluate provider technical capabilities, performance, pricing, and strategic relevance. Build a pipeline of emerging model developers, cloud inference platforms, and GPU/ASIC providers. Manage end-to-end relationships with key providers, including roadmap collaboration and QBRs. Partner with Engineering and Product for smooth technical integration and metadata accuracy. Build scalable compliance programs for data handling standards (no-train/no-retain, ZDR, SOC2/ISO, GDPR, TPRM). Establish recurring compliance reviews and risk classifications. Develop systems to identify billing discrepancies and revenue leakage. Partner with Finance for accurate rate cards, rev-share structures, and payout workflows. Lead enforcement of provider SLAs, including uptime, latency, throughput, and error rate standards. Lead negotiation of complex provider partnerships involving pricing, data privacy, and reliability. Structure agreements balancing mutual value with OpenRouter's obligations. Build scalable onboarding documentation and processes. Collaborate with Product and Engineering to influence roadmap decisions. Work with Growth, Support, and Marketing to communicate provider changes. Maintain visibility into the AI/ML and inference ecosystem.