Software Engineer, Trust & Safety

About the role

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.

ABOUT 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’LL 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.