Founding Forward-Deployed Engineer (FDE)

nRouter is a private, early-stage company building an LLM gateway — one API key, one bill, a live multi-provider model catalog, every enterprise feature included on every plan. It's live, in production, with real customers. As a founding Forward-Deployed Engineer you're the technical bridge to those customers: you embed with them, get their applications running on the gateway, and turn what you learn in the field into product. This is a founding role, and we're mostly hiring new graduates with strong fundamentals and great communication. Compensation mirrors our other founding seat: expenses-only for your first three months while we build to revenue, then base salary begins — set by your country and location within a confidential range. After one year of continuous service you're recognized with co-founder status, and your founding equity matures only after three years of continuous service. We're a private company, so this is private-company stock, not publicly traded. You'll need short personal runway for the first three months; in return you get real ownership and direct customer impact from week one.

What you'll do

• Embed with customers and get them live on the gateway — integrate nRouter into their stack and migrate them off direct provider SDKs
• Build proofs-of-concept and reference integrations directly in the customer's codebase
• Own technical onboarding — configure keys, guardrails, prompts, and budgets around each customer's needs
• Debug integrations end to end and feed field learnings back to the core engineering team
• Be the technical face on customer calls — translate their goals into what the gateway can do

Required experience

• New graduates welcome — strong CS fundamentals and a fast learner
• Comfortable reading and writing Python and/or TypeScript in an unfamiliar codebase
• Excellent written and spoken communication — you are customer-facing from week one
• Comfortable with ambiguity, customer calls across time zones, and short personal runway for the first three months

Nice to have

• A shipped side project, hackathon win, or open-source work we can look at
• Any experience integrating an API or LLM into a real app
• You want to be in the room with customers, not just the codebase

nRouter is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome builders from all backgrounds and non-traditional career paths.

If you need reasonable accommodations at any stage of our interview process, reach out directly to careers@nrouter.ai. Requests are kept confidential and have zero adverse impact on your application.