Whitney Menarcheck
I'm Whitney Menarcheck. I build, run, and scale online communities and in-person events. Currently, I'm helping redesign and scale a local AI community. Previously, I spent 16 months taking the Lovable Discord server from a support channel to a thriving online community. I've run hackathons, facilitated global events, and hosted live webinars, fireside chats, and more.
How I used OpenRouter's own API to prepare my application for OpenRouter's Community Lead role
You can't lead a community around a product you don't use. It's not a nice-to-have, it's the whole job. Credibility with builders comes from building alongside them. I had used OpenRouter before applying for this role, but this application was a chance to go further and put it to work in a new way. I leveraged OpenRouter itself to tailor my own resume and cover letter for it. Here's the process, step by step.
Step 1 of 7
1Writing the job description into job.md
Before running anything, I copied OpenRouter's actual job posting into a file called job.md, the second input the script needs alongside my resume content in resume.md.
2Four drafts, one run
I ran a Python script (tailor.py) that sent the same job description and resume content to four different models on OpenRouter at once: GPT-4o-mini, Llama 3.3 70B, Claude Haiku 4.5, and Gemini 2.5 Flash. It returned four independent resume drafts, timing and cost for each model, and, in the same run, an initial critique of my resume from openai/gpt-4o-mini playing a skeptical hiring manager. It flagged three gaps: public presence and visibility, current AI trends knowledge, and depth of hands-on LLM and API experience.
3Picking one, and why
I compared the four drafts directly. The Llama draft carried over a stale growth figure, 143%, based on Discord numbers from before I'd corrected them elsewhere. The GPT-4o-mini draft got my years of experience wrong. The Gemini draft was the strongest, and the only one that connected the application-prep process itself to the job's "hands-on LLM API experience" requirement.
I went with the Gemini 2.5 Flash draft as my base, then hand-revised it further as new facts and critique feedback came in. The resume I actually submitted is a descendant of that draft, not a straight copy of it.
These are the actual drafts from that run, unedited.
WHITNEY I. MENARCHECK
Pittsburgh, PA, USA | whitney.menarcheck@gmail.com | +1 412-758-4488 | linkedin.com/in/whitneymenarcheck/
SUMMARY
Community Lead with 3+ years experience building and scaling developer communities, with a focus on systems and automations for broad impact. Repositioned Lovable's Discord from a support channel to an active community, growing membership by 143% to over 170,000 members. Designed and scaled contributor programs, including Lovable's Champions program from 8 to 20 volunteer leaders, and co-founded SheBuilds, a global hackathon program with 7,500+ applications across 120+ countries. Experience building automations and tooling for community listening and sentiment tracking, including preparing this application using the OpenRouter API for multi-model resume drafts and hiring-manager critiques. Comfortable being publicly visible as a company representative, with extensive experience hosting live events, coordinating subject matter experts, and representing products at conferences. Background as a startup founder and experience advising an AI community on growth, engagement, and data infrastructure.
EXPERIENCE
Community Manager | Lovable
Product Experience Specialist -> Community Marketer -> Community Manager | Jun 2025 - Sep 2026
Joined as one of Lovable's first 50 employees, pre-Series A; progressed from Product Experience Specialist to Community Marketer to Community Manager within four months.
- Repositioned Lovable's Discord from the company's only support channel into a real, active community with programming and volunteer leadership; membership grew 143% during the transition.
- Scaled the volunteer Champions program from 8 to 20, giving community leadership a structure that ran independent of any one person, not just more volunteers doing the same unstructured work, and managed the NDA process for program participants.
- Co-founded and ran SheBuilds end to end across all 3 seasons: owned the full application, review, and selection pipeline, onboarding, webinar and training facilitation, the 48-hour hackathon, and winner announcements. Built SheBuilds as a repeatable seasonal program, then codified the process into a hackathon playbook adopted by other teams within the organization. 7,500+ applications across 120+ countries, zero marketing spend.
- Hosted two live community events each week, plus recurring monthly build -> run -> grow webinars, maintaining a consistent, hands-on presence alongside Champions and community members.
- Served as the direct feedback channel between the builder community and cross-functional product, marketing, and engineering teams, surfacing user needs and blockers in real time.
- Led Lovable's global International Women's Day community activation: coordinated 120 community-hosted in-person events across 40+ countries within the same 24 hours, produced the flagship livestream from Stockholm, and emceed a fireside chat with leaders from Lovable, Anthropic, and the co-founder of Future Forum at Slack.
- Supported Lovable Shipped, a six-week community accelerator on Circle, first on community management and later handling program operations behind the scenes.
Community Consultant | AI@Work
Aug 2026 - Present
Advising a Pittsburgh-based grassroots AI community on community, marketing, growth, and social media strategy. Redesigning their Slack community structure and communication flow. Building data infrastructure to track community growth, engagement, and retention, and to support data-informed programming decisions ahead of a planned 2027 expansion.
Founder & CEO | Transcendworx
Oct 2022 - Aug 2025
Founded and led a startup applying technology to close gaps in addiction research, owning strategy, product direction, and stakeholder relationships from concept through operation; hired and managed a small team. Stage 1 Winner, NIDA SUD Startup Challenge.
Chief Innovation Officer (Fractional) | Straight Up Care
Sep 2023 - Dec 2024
Facilitated the organization's peer specialist community; drove strategic growth and innovation initiatives. Created, hosted, and produced a weekly video interview podcast: 52 episodes, owning guest sourcing, recording, editing, and promotion end to end.
Clinical Applications Director | Behaivior
Nov 2022 - Aug 2023
Worked across product, marketing, sales, and fundraising at an early-stage digital health company: represented the product at conferences, led outbound outreach to practitioners and buyers, presented to investors, and met with grant administrators on non-dilutive funding. Supported the company's participation in NSF I-Corps.
Deputy Director, Systems Transformation Support | University of Pittsburgh, School of Pharmacy, Program Evaluation and Research Unit
Senior Clinical Quality Improvement Specialist -> Assistant Director -> Deputy Director | Feb 2020 - Nov 2022
Provided strategic guidance on systems transformation as part of senior leadership, supporting cross-disciplinary implementation of a statewide operating framework.
EDUCATION & CERTIFICATES
- Certificate of Completion, No Code AI and Machine Learning: Building Data Science Solutions - MIT, 2025
- Certificate of Completion, MIT SUD Ventures - MIT Bootcamps, 2025
- Certificate of Completion, Babson SUD Sprint - Babson College, 2023
- Master of Science, Counseling Psychology - Chatham University, 2012
- Bachelor of Science, Psychology - Saint Joseph's University, 2010
CORE SKILLS
Developer Community Management | Discord Stewardship | Contributor Programs | Event & Hackathon Planning | Community-to-Product Feedback | Social Media Engagement | AI-Native Workflow & Automation | LLM API Integration | Moderation & Volunteer Support | Cross-Functional Collaboration | Data Infrastructure Design | Public Speaking & Representation
PLATFORMS & TOOLS
Discord | Slack | Notion | Luma | Zapier | Circle | Claude / Claude Cowork / Claude Code | ChatGPT | OpenRouter | Reddit | StreamYard | Riverside FM | YouTube Studio | Canva
The resume I actually submitted
WHITNEY I. MENARCHECK
Pittsburgh, PA, USA | whitney.menarcheck@gmail.com | +1 412-758-4488
linkedin.com/in/whitneymenarcheck/ | openrouter.whitneymenarcheck.com
SUMMARY
Community leader with 3+ years building and scaling tech communities. At Lovable, repositioned the company's sole support channel Discord into an active community, growing membership from 55,302 to 172,000+. Redesigned the volunteer Champions program, folding moderation into a single role that also covers education and culture-setting rather than a narrow enforcement function, rebuilding a disengaged core of 8 to 21 people across 9 countries. Co-founded and ran SheBuilds, an end-to-end hackathon program attracting 7,500+ applications across 120+ countries with zero marketing spend, and led a global International Women's Day activation across 126 in-person events in 43 countries. Hands-on experience building with LLMs and APIs, including a Discord community health bot and tools built on the OpenRouter API. Comfortable being publicly visible, hosting a twice-weekly live community event and maintaining an 11,000+ LinkedIn following.
EXPERIENCE
Community Manager | Lovable
Product Experience Specialist -> Community Marketer -> Community Manager | Jun 2025 - Sep 2026
Joined as one of Lovable's first 50 employees, pre-Series A; progressed from Product Experience Specialist to Community Marketer to Community Manager within four months.
- Repositioned Lovable's Discord server from the company's only support channel into an active community with programming and volunteer leadership; membership grew from 55,302 to 172,000+ (~211%) during my tenure.
- Inherited a 50-person volunteer Champions program that had become largely disengaged, cut it to a working core of 8, then rebuilt and scaled it to 21 people across 9 countries, designing a structure that gave community leadership real ownership over engagement, moderation, and programming, running independent of any one person.
- Co-founded and ran SheBuilds end to end across all 3 seasons: owned the full application, review, and selection pipeline, onboarding, webinar and training facilitation, the 48-hour hackathon, and winner announcements. Built SheBuilds as a repeatable seasonal program, then codified the process into a hackathon playbook adopted by other teams within the organization. 7,500+ applications across 120+ countries, zero marketing spend.
- Served as the direct feedback channel between the builder community and cross-functional product, marketing, and engineering teams, surfacing user needs and blockers in real time.
- Led Lovable's global International Women's Day community activation: coordinated 126 community-hosted in-person events across 43 countries within the same 24 hours, drawing 3,100+ attendees. Designing a host playbook for successful event facilitation. Produced the flagship livestream from Stockholm and emceed a fireside chat with leaders from Lovable, Anthropic, and Slack's Future Forum.
- Hosted "Open Door," a live community event twice a week, maintaining a consistent, hands-on public presence alongside Champions and community members.
- Implemented a comprehensive analytics process for monitoring season-to-season growth and impact, including NPS, CSAT, CES, and user retention post-event.
- Supported Lovable Shipped, a six-week community accelerator on Circle, first on community management and later handling program operations behind the scenes.
Community (Freelance) | AI@Work
Aug 2026 - Present
Advising a Pittsburgh-based grassroots AI community on community, marketing, growth, and social media strategy. Redesigning their Slack community structure and communication flow. Building data infrastructure to track community growth, engagement, and retention for data-informed programming decisions ahead of a planned 2027 expansion.
Founder & CEO | Transcendworx
Oct 2022 - Aug 2025
Founded and led a startup applying technology to close gaps in addiction research, owning strategy, product direction, and stakeholder relationships from concept through operation; hired and managed a small team. Stage 1 Winner, NIDA SUD Startup Challenge.
Guest Faculty, Entrepreneurship | Shady Side Academy
May 2025 - Jun 2025
Co-designed and delivered an immersive youth entrepreneurship course grounded in a strengths-based, self-discovery framework, building an iterative, student-shaped curriculum in real time.
Chief Innovation Officer (Fractional) | Straight Up Care
Sep 2023 - Dec 2024
Facilitated the organization's peer specialist community; drove strategic growth and innovation initiatives. Created, hosted, and produced a weekly video interview podcast: 52 episodes, owning guest sourcing, recording, editing, and promotion end to end.
Clinical Applications Director | Behaivior
Nov 2022 - Aug 2023
Worked across product, marketing, sales, and fundraising at an early-stage digital health company: represented the product at ~5 conferences, led outbound outreach to practitioners and buyers, presented to investors, and met with grant administrators. Supported the company's participation in NSF I-Corps.
Deputy Director, Systems Transformation Support | University of Pittsburgh
Sr Clinical Quality Improvement Specialist -> Assistant Director, Systems Transformation Support -> Deputy Director, Systems Transformation Support | Feb 2020 - Nov 2022
Provided strategic guidance on systems transformation as part of senior leadership, supporting cross-disciplinary implementation of a statewide operating framework.
EDUCATION & CERTIFICATES
- Certificate of Completion, No Code AI and Machine Learning: Building Data Science Solutions - MIT, 2025
- Certificate of Completion, MIT SUD Ventures - MIT Bootcamps, 2025
- Certificate of Completion, Babson SUD Sprint - Babson College, 2023
- Master of Science, Counseling Psychology - Chatham University, 2012
- Bachelor of Science, Psychology - Saint Joseph's University, 2010
CORE SKILLS
Community Building & Growth: Discord Community Management, Developer Community Growth, Program Design & Scaling, Moderator & Contributor Programs
Product & Feedback: Community-to-Product Feedback, Community Sentiment Analysis
Events & Presence: Online & In-Person Events, Public Speaking & Representation, Social Media Strategy (Discord/LinkedIn/Reddit/X)
Technical: LLM & API Integration, Agentic Workflows & MCP, Automation & Tooling
Collaboration: Cross-Team Partnership (Product, Marketing, Engineering), Team-to-Community Collaboration (Champions Program), External Partner Collaboration (IWD, incl. Anthropic & Stripe)
PLATFORMS & TOOLS
Community Platforms: Discord, Slack, Reddit, Circle, Luma
AI & Development: OpenRouter, Claude/Claude Cowork/Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub, ChatGPT
Productivity & Automation: Notion, Zapier, GitHub Actions
Content & Events Production: StreamYard, Riverside FM, YouTube Studio, Canva
TECHNICAL BUILDING
- Co-built a Discord community health bot (with a Champion) performing sentiment analysis, trend detection, activity tracking, and retention analysis; running since April 2026 and feeding monthly community health reports.
- Built a Discord-Slack connector bot that forwards Discord posts to engineers, marketing, and other internal stakeholders, with a link back to the original and the option to subscribe to replies.
- Built Python CLI tools on the OpenRouter API (multi-model comparison, resume-tailoring with automated critique), calling multiple models in parallel and handling routing, cost tracking, and structured output parsing.
- Wrote and edited code for the Lovable Shipped website (Jul-Aug 2025); all changes went through GitHub pull requests, using Claude Code and Cursor for writing and review.
- Built whitneymenarcheck.com and shebuilds.lovable.app in Lovable, plus a personal EA/Chief-of-Staff agent and recurring Claude Cowork automations for workflow.
4Closing the gaps
I revised the underlying resume content to address those three gaps directly, then reran the tailor-and-critique loop against the same job description. The new critique read differently: the gaps it had flagged before weren't showing up anymore.
5Same test, different document
I wrote a cover letter by hand, then ran it through the same critique tool as if it were a resume, to pressure-test it against the job description the same way. A cover letter wasn't requested as part of the application, but I wanted to see how my new process would do with one.
6Iterating and polishing the wording
I revised the cover letter across a few rounds based on specific critique feedback: how to frame the moderation philosophy behind the Champions program, how to answer doubts about technical depth, and how to directly address being based in Pittsburgh rather than the Bay Area. For final wording, I used a second script, compare.py, to send the near-finished letter to all four models at once with instructions to improve flow and clarity without changing any facts or claims, then picked the strongest individual lines across the four outputs rather than using any single model's version wholesale.
7Making sure it still sounded like me
Every round left me with model suggestions I didn't use. I rejected rewrites that softened lines I meant to keep sharp, corrected facts the models got wrong along the way, and made sure the priorities in the final letter were mine, not whatever a critique model thought would read best. Using OpenRouter to prepare this application meant checking its output at every step, not deferring to it.
The letter I actually sent
WHITNEY I. MENARCHECK
Pittsburgh, PA, USA | whitney.menarcheck@gmail.com | +1 412-758-4488
linkedin.com/in/whitneymenarcheck/ | openrouter.whitneymenarcheck.com
September 5, 2026
Dear OpenRouter Hiring Team,
I believe deeply that it's essential for a community leader to use, not just endorse, the tool they are building a community around. For that reason, I crafted my resume and cover letter using OpenRouter. I believe this effectively demonstrates my understanding of your platform while also conveying my qualifications for the Community Lead role. You can view the entire process I used at openrouter.whitneymenarcheck.comopenrouter.whitneymenarcheck.com.
I spent the last 16 months building OpenRouter's Discord equivalent inside Lovable: what started as a 55,302-member support queue I repositioned into an active community of 172,000+. The transformation mattered more than the number. Early on in my tenure I did something that scared me, I started a live stage event in the Lovable Discord server with no agenda, no talking points, expecting an hour of complaints. Instead, I got a real conversation, so I made it a twice-weekly fixture called Open Door, still agenda-free, still just me showing up with the server Champions. That's the job description's "the one who is always around, always listening" line, and it's also just how I actually work.
On moderation specifically: I intentionally folded moderation into the Champions role that also covers education, build support, and culture-setting. When I stepped in to lead Discord, there were 50 disengaged "Champions" which I pared down to 8, then scaled to 21 men and women from 9 different countries. A narrow enforcement-only mod role tends to create authority dynamics that work against belonging. A multi-function role that's recognized non-monetarily for the full range of what someone contributes doesn't have that problem, and it's held up at 21 people the same way it did at 8.
On hands-on LLM building: a Champion and I co-built a Discord bot that runs sentiment analysis, trend detection, and retention tracking, feeding a monthly community health report we've used since April. I've also used the OpenRouter API directly, building tools for comparing models and for tailoring and critiquing resumes, handling routing, cost tracking, and structured output. I'm not a developer by background, I'm someone who picked up the tools because I had a desire to learn and expand my capabilities.
I'm based in Pittsburgh, not the Bay Area, and I'm glad to travel regularly for events. My community track record includes a global International Women's Day activation run across 126 in-person events in 43 countries in a single 24-hour window, in-person events, and livestreamed webinars and fireside chats. Travel and in-person coordination aren't new territory to me.
I'd welcome the chance to talk through what the first few months could look like.
Best,
Whitney Menarcheck