---
title: "Mate Security’s Asaf Wiener made every backend engineer a model router. He’s right to."
url: https://daily.dev/posts/mate-security-s-asaf-wiener-made-every-backend-engineer-a-model-router-he-s-right-to--hqi457vzs
source_url: https://thenewstack.io/mate-security-inference-economics
type: article
source: "The New Stack"
published: 2026-06-04T15:27:49.032Z
updated: 2026-06-04T15:28:16.565Z
tags: ["security", "ai-agents", "ai-inference"]
reading_time: 11
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

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# Mate Security’s Asaf Wiener made every backend engineer a model router. He’s right to.

**[The New Stack](https://daily.dev/sources/newstack)** · 11 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

Mate Security CEO Asaf Wiener shares how a spike in AI inference costs nearly killed the startup, prompting a full restructuring of how the company manages model selection. Rather than centralizing model decisions with a research team, every backend engineer now owns model evaluation and routing for their workloads. Engineers run continuous evals against frontier and open-source models, routing workloads to whichever model wins on quality and cost. Inference is broken into ~10 sub-lines on the CEO dashboard, measured per investigation. The approach also reshaped hiring — Mate filters for 'resilience for changing' and won't hire engineers uncomfortable with constant workflow churn. The result: overnight agent-generated integrations, sometimes self-approved, and a model layer that's no longer a fixed vendor cost.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://thenewstack.io/mate-security-inference-economics>

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---

Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents), [#ai-inference](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-inference)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/mate-security-s-asaf-wiener-made-every-backend-engineer-a-model-router-he-s-right-to--hqi457vzs)