Community Lead, Developer Relations

Job description

**THIS ROLE IS REQUIRED TO BE BASED IN THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA** ## About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the open 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 some of 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. ## The Role We're looking for a Community Lead to become the heartbeat of OpenRouter's developer community. You will be the person our community knows by name and recognizes in person, the one who is always around, always listening, and always making the community a better place to be. OpenRouter's Discord is already one of the largest AI communities anywhere. Over 50,000 members, hundreds of threads, and thousands of chats every week. It is THE place where people talk about models, harnesses, new techniques, and projects. Not just OpenRouter, but AI in general. You are a community person first and a developer at heart. You've built with LLMs, you understand what AI builders care about, and you're fluent in the culture of the spaces where they gather. You will own this Discord and grow our presence across Twitter/X, Reddit, and other community channels, turning an already thriving community into the best place on the internet to be an AI builder. This is a hands-on, founding community role. In the first 3 months, you will be the primary steward of the community, with the opportunity to shape how the function scales over time. You'll work closely with our DevRel and marketing teams as a complementary, community-focused counterpart. Everything you do in this role should be 1:n. Instead of hosting one meetup, you create the event kit that lets a community member in any city run their own. Instead of answering the same question ten times, you build the automation that surfaces it once. Instead of personally moderating every channel, you recruit and equip a mod team that scales without you. The focus is digital first, roughly an 80/20 split between online community work and in-person community events to start. This role is not about selling or broadcasting. It is about presence, trust, and making OpenRouter's community a place developers genuinely want to be. ## What You'll Do - **Discord Stewardship:** Own and run OpenRouter's Discord end to end. Design and run Discord-specific events, giveaways, and challenges that keep the community engaged and growing. - **Community Programs:** Own and scale our recognition programs for contributors and helpers, such as special Discord roles for members who help us find bugs or support other members, and design new programs as the community grows. - **Moderation & Mod Team:** Recruit, onboard, and support a team of community moderators. Design non-monetary recognition and benefits that make moderating OpenRouter's community rewarding. - **Community Pulse:** Be the full-time ears of the company. Actively listen to how the community feels about OpenRouter, about models, and about the AI space overall, and report that pulse back to the team continuously. - **Community Automations:** Build and maintain automations that surface community sentiment, trends, and signals at scale, extending the tooling we've already started. - **In-Person Community Events:** Partner with our events team to make community events a flywheel over time. Instead of running events one by one, build the playbooks, resources, and support that let community members in different locales launch their own OpenRouter events. - **Social Presence:** Extend community energy to Twitter/X and other socials, engaging with developers where they are and amplifying community moments. - **Product Feedback Loop:** Own the loop from community to product. Synthesize community feedback, bug reports, and sentiment into actionable insights for engineering, product, and design, and close the loop back to the community when their input ships. - **Collaboration:** Partner with marketing and DevRel on community-facing campaigns, launches, and content as a complementary community voice. ## What Success Looks Like (First 6 Months) - OpenRouter's Discord is widely seen as one of the best AI builder communities, with a regular cadence of events, challenges, and giveaways. - A healthy, active moderator team is in place with clear roles, recognition, and benefits. - Community members are consistently recognized for their contributions through structured role and reward programs. - The team has a reliable, always-on read of community sentiment about OpenRouter, models, and the broader AI space, supported by automation. - Community feedback visibly informs product decisions and roadmap prioritization. ## What We're Looking For - 3+ years of experience in community management, developer community, or a closely related role. - Experience running Discord communities (or similar) at meaningful scale, including events, programs, and moderation. - Hands-on experience building with LLMs and their APIs. You've shipped projects using them, can read and write example code, and can credibly discuss model tradeoffs, harnesses, and techniques with working developers. - Personable, humble, and highly accessible. The kind of person a community naturally gravitates toward. - Terminally online in the best way. You already live in the spaces where AI developers hang out and you know the current mood of the space at any given moment. - Strong written communication with a natural, human voice across Discord, Twitter/X, and Reddit. - Background designing contributor, ambassador, or moderator programs. - Experience running online events, hackathons, giveaways, or community challenges. - A 1:n mindset. You build programs and systems that scale the community, not one-off interactions. - Self-directed and entrepreneurial. Able to define problems, identify leverage, and execute independently. - Comfortable being publicly visible as a representative of OpenRouter. - The ideal candidate is based in the Bay Area, or has the ability to travel for events regularly. ## Nice to Have - Experience building automations or lightweight tooling for community listening and sentiment tracking. - Experience running or scaling in-person community events and meetups across cities or regions. - Familiarity with OpenRouter as a user. - Experience creating light content (threads, clips, memes, recaps) that resonates with developer audiences. ## Why OpenRouter - Work at the center of the AI infrastructure stack as enterprises define how they adopt LLMs. - High ownership and autonomy to define how community scales at OpenRouter. - Opportunity to shape a foundational function at a fast-growing company. - Fully remote team with a culture of autonomy and trust. - Competitive compensation, including base salary and equity.