Scaled Customer Success Manager, Startups

About the role

We're looking for a Scaled Customer Success Manager, Startups to build and own the post-sale engine for OpenRouter's startup ecosystem. This is a builder role, not a scaled nurture role. OpenRouter's startup ecosystem is one of the company's most important growth surfaces, powered in part by the OpenRouter for Startups program, which helps AI-native companies access credits, infrastructure, and multi-model tooling to build and scale faster. Your job is to make that ecosystem work at scale. You'll own the startup customer journey from program approval and onboarding through activation, retention, expansion, and Enterprise readiness. You'll also own day-to-day program operations and communications across the OpenRouter for Startups ecosystem, while helping launch new initiatives, workflows, and partner programs over time.

Responsibilities

• Build the Startup Success Engine
• Own the scaled success motion for OpenRouter's startup and scaled customer portfolio.
• Partner cross-functionally to iterate and refine the operating system for startup activation, retention, growth, and Enterprise conversion.
• Create and refine the workflows, dashboards, alerts, and playbooks that help the team understand which startups need attention, why they need it, and what action should happen next.
• Turn manual customer success and program operations work into repeatable systems.
• Drive Activation, Retention, and Growth
• Own the start-up inbox, day-to-day program communications, and portfolio health across the startup segment.
• Build scaled intervention workflows for customers showing risk signals.
• Create activation paths that help startups reach first value quickly and understand how to use OpenRouter effectively.
• Partner with Sales to surface startups ready for Enterprise conversion, higher usage commitments, premium support, compliance, observability, throughput, or strategic partnership.
• Work across GTM to expand distribution, improve onboarding and activation, and connect the startup program to broader growth initiatives.
• Engineer Workflows and Automations
• Build practical systems that make scaled customer success possible.
• Use AI-native tools and automation to reduce manual work across onboarding, follow-up, risk detection, expansion identification, reporting, and feedback capture.
• Build self-serve resources that help technical founders succeed without waiting for human intervention.
• This role requires someone who can build, not just coordinate.
• Own Startup Health and Expansion Signals
• Define what "healthy" looks like for startup customers.
• Segment the portfolio into cohorts.
• Create the operating cadence for reviewing startup portfolio health.
• Improve the Startup Program
• Help evolve OpenRouter's startup program into a scalable growth engine.
• Improve the application, approval, onboarding, activation, communication, and follow-up experience.
• Build rubrics and workflows that identify high-potential AI-native startups and route them into the right journey.
• Ensure approved startups get value quickly and have clear paths to scale.
• Continuously improve how the program runs by streamlining processes and creating better experiences for founders, partners, and internal teams alike.
• Create Product Feedback Loops
• Turn startup customer, founder, and partner interactions into structured product signal.
• Capture and synthesize feedback across onboarding friction, model availability, routing behavior, latency, reliability, pricing, documentation gaps, integration blockers, and developer experience.
• Surface patterns to Product and Engineering based on frequency, customer severity, growth potential, and revenue impact.
• Build feedback loops that improve the experience for the entire startup ecosystem, not just one account at a time.

Requirements

• You might be a fit if you are energized by building the system, not just running the motion.
• You have managed a scaled customer portfolio, startup program operations, developer ecosystem, PLG customer base, or technical customer segment.
• You care deeply about startups and understand the realities of early-stage building. You enjoy working closely with founders, operators, and emerging teams as they navigate product-market fit, growth, and scale.
• You are comfortable working with technical founders and developer-facing products.
• You understand API-first businesses and can speak credibly about usage, latency, reliability, cost, integr

Benefits

Additional Information

About OpenRouter OpenRouter is the unified interface for AI inference, giving developers and organizations access to hundreds of models through a single API. Our platform helps teams choose, route, evaluate, and scale model usage across providers, making it easier to build production AI applications with the right model for every use case. As inference becomes a core operating layer for modern software companies, OpenRouter helps customers move faster, reduce complexity, and get more value from the rapidly evolving model ecosystem.

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