Careers at EliseAI: Teams, Pay and How to Get Hired

The Quiet Predecessor

One in six U.S. apartments now runs on EliseAI's platform, Forbes reported. The company crossed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in May 2026, Forbes's data shows, employs 599 people, and commands a $2.2 billion valuation, Forbes found, after a $250 million Series E, Forbes's figures put it, led by Andreessen Horowitz. While venture capital flooded into large language model wrappers after ChatGPT's release, a New York team had already spent years training models on the conversations between renters and property managers. That head start, built before the hype cycle arrived, is why EliseAI now automates leasing across engineering, product, data, sales, and customer-success teams with a compensation band of $86,000–$332,000, a multi-stage interview that screens for problem-solving and mission alignment, and a culture that selects for collaborative low-ego individuals who thrive on clear impact and rapid iteration.

EliseAI was founded in 2017 by Minna Song, Carrie Murphy, and Stoyan Stoyanov. Song took a job as a receptionist at a Manhattan real estate firm to learn the industry firsthand, visiting dozens of buildings to understand where communication broke down. Prospective tenants couldn't reach anyone after hours. Nobody called back. Follow-up simply didn't happen. The founders bet on two trends most competitors ignored: AI that could handle open-ended, multi-channel conversations like a person, and a platform flexible enough to serve more than one vertical. They raised no venture capital for two years, a rarity even then, before a $1.9 million seed round in 2019 and a $6.5 million Series A. The Series D in August 2024 brought $75 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Sapphire Ventures.

Five Functions, One Stack

Engineering and product teams build the conversational stack, today 11 products spanning multifamily and healthcare, using open-source models such as Alibaba's Qwen-4B fine-tuned on domain-specific data. Data teams manage training pipelines that ingest hundreds of thousands of voice calls from healthcare partners, which in turn sharpen the voice product for housing customers. Sales and customer-success teams work with 70 percent of the top 50 multifamily owners and operators, names like Equity Residential, AvalonBay, Invitation Homes, and Bozzuto, and with healthcare groups such as Dermatology Partners, where the voice agent now answers 500 calls a day across 42 locations. The healthcare vertical, launched in 2023, brought a new regulatory layer: affordable-housing conversations require the system to assess income eligibility and communicate denials sensitively, while medical offices demand HIPAA-compliant scheduling, billing, and insurance verification.

Who Thrives Here

The work demands managing a labyrinth of jurisdiction-specific regulations, fair-housing law, healthcare privacy rules, affordable-housing compliance, while shipping product on rapid iteration cycles. The company describes its culture as collaborative and low-ego, with an emphasis on clear impact over title or territory. The hiring process explicitly screens for mission alignment alongside problem-solving.

Pay and Equity

EliseAI's compensation structure reflects its position as a well-funded AI company scaling past unicorn status. Zero G Talent's board data shows a company-wide salary band matching $86,000–$332,000 with a median of $210,000 across 87 salaried roles. Levels.fyi, drawing on user-reported offers as of August 2026, places the median total compensation higher at $240,100 and reports a wider spread: $147,000 at the low end for a Solution Architect to $422,500 at the high end for a Software Engineer. The same source pegs the highest reported Software Engineer package at $496,250. EliseAI's own Ashby posting for a senior role lists a base range of $240,000–$300,000, noting that final numbers depend on experience, skill level, location, and qualifications assessed during interviews.

Equity is a meaningful component. Levels.fyi documents a standard four-year vesting schedule: 25% after year one, then 2.08% monthly for the remaining three years. EliseAI's job postings describe equity as part of a "competitive total rewards package" alongside base salary and benefits. Recruitingfromscratch notes that equity is not included in the median figures above and can be "often large — especially at high-growth and AI-native companies."

Benefits That Matter

The Ashby posting lists medical, dental, and vision premiums covered at 100%, fully paid parental leave, 401(k), commuter benefits, a fitness and home services stipend, unlimited vacation and paid holidays, and relocation packages. Meals are covered in-office at all locations, with fully stocked kitchens and open floor plans. BuiltIn confirms the fully employer-paid healthcare tier and adds wellness and mental-health support. The company also mentions "unlimited tokens," likely referring to API or compute credits for internal experimentation.

Glassdoor's estimate puts the average Software Engineer salary at $147,950, roughly 27% above its own EliseAI average of $116,378 for the same title — a gap that reflects differing methodologies and the exclusion of equity from Glassdoor's figures. Candidates should treat posted ranges as midpoints; total compensation at the senior end routinely clears $400,000 when equity appreciates.

Inside the Interview Loop

EliseAI runs a four-to-five-round loop that typically spans two to four weeks, per interview guides compiled from candidate reports and recruiter descriptions. Half the pipeline originates from inbound LinkedIn outreach; the other half comes through the careers page. The sequence is consistent: a recruiter screen, a behavioral interview, a take-home assignment, a presentation of that work, and a final behavioral round with a senior leader. Glassdoor aggregates 176 reviews and 158 questions for the company, and candidates rate the overall difficulty a moderate 3.0 out of 5 — not because the questions are tricky, but because the practical exercises demand real time and judgment.

The recruiter screen is brief, often 20 to 30 minutes, and focuses on motivation and baseline fit. Candidates report being asked "Why EliseAI?" and hearing the company's framing: housing and healthcare don't leave much room for error, so the bar for hiring is deliberately high. The behavioral round that follows digs into prioritization and client communication — two competencies the take-home will stress-test. Interviewers want STAR stories about juggling competing tickets, diagnosing customer issues, and writing clear, professional emails from raw content.

The Take-Home Centerpiece

The take-home is the centerpiece. It mimics the day-to-day hybrid work of a solutions engineer or similar client-facing technical role: ticket and inquiry prioritization by severity, a client-facing email draft, a customer-issue diagnosis, and a small technical build (often a simple web app). Candidates describe it as engaging but time-consuming, and multiple reports confirm it carries disproportionate weight in the final decision. The assignment is not a puzzle; it's a work sample. Recruiters evaluate whether the candidate can prioritize ruthlessly, communicate like a partner to a property manager or healthcare administrator, and ship a functioning prototype quickly.

The presentation round asks the candidate to walk a panel through the take-home, defend design choices, and field follow-up questions. This is frequently the last hurdle, and several candidates report being rejected here despite feeling the earlier conversations went well. One candidate wrote they were "rejected after the presentation and was not offered any feedback after spending hours to complete the assessment and prep for the presentation." The final behavioral round, when it occurs, revisits culture alignment and long-term motivation with a senior leader, often a VP or director, who probes whether the candidate will thrive in a low-ego, high-iteration environment.

The Feedback Gap

A consistent frustration across reviews: rejections often arrive with no feedback, even after the full assessment cycle. Some candidates report a quick "no" the morning after submitting the take-home, with little or no explanation. Interviewers themselves are described as personable and easy to schedule with; one candidate noted a replacement interviewer "seemed like the replacement didn't want to be there" but still tried to engage. The process is organized, but the feedback loop is broken.

What Separates Successful Candidates

Preparation that mirrors the actual work. Guides recommend building sharp STAR stories around ticket triage and customer escalation, practicing client-email writing from provided prompts, brushing up on spinning up a minimal web app in a few hours, and rehearsing a clean, structured presentation that a senior leader can follow without domain context. The company's own messaging underscores the same filters: clear professional writing, sound prioritization judgment, practical problem-solving, and genuine motivation for the product. EliseAI is hiring aggressively — "a significant amount of the funds are going to be going to expanding our teams," leadership said in a 2025 video, but the filter remains tight because the industries served punish error.

Offices, Labs, and the In-Office Bet

EliseAI operates as a fully in-office company — employees work on site four to five days a week across six physical locations, five in the United States and one in Toronto. As of the company's January 2026 announcement, the New York headquarters is mid-move from 33 East 33rd Street to a 109,000-square-foot lease at 401 Fifth Avenue, a landmark eight-floor, 240,000-square-foot building at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 37th Street. The new space more than doubles the previous Midtown footprint and anchors a 10-year agreement with the Chetrit Organization. Leadership described the choice as critical to sustaining an in-person culture that "creates a truly exceptional experience for our people to collaborate and do their best work." The headquarters serves as the central hub for corporate leadership, software development, and operational decision-making, with direct access to multiple subway lines and the dense amenities of the Empire State Building corridor.

The San Francisco office at 425 California Street positions the company inside the West Coast talent pool that feeds its AI and machine-learning roadmap. This location enables EliseAI to better serve its West Coast client base and accelerates the development and deployment of its AI solutions by tapping into the region's rich pool of technology talent. Boston occupies the ninth floor of 501 Boylston Street in the Back Bay. Chicago sits at 330 North Wabash Avenue. Dallas, listed without a street address in public filings, functions as the Southwest anchor for the enterprise sales motion that the job board shows hiring at the $350,000–$400,000 range for senior enterprise sales managers. Toronto's office at 325 Front Street West rounds out the network.

Across every site, the on-site experience is standardized: paid meals, that stipend, regular team events, and unlimited PTO that the company frames as "time off to reset and return to the office fully charged." Job postings on Zero G Talent's board confirm three cities from first-party hiring data: New York City (Strategic Sales Manager, Chief Marketing Officer, Senior Enterprise Sales Manager, Staff Software Engineer), Dallas (Senior Enterprise Sales Manager), and San Francisco (Enterprise Sales Manager). The other three offices, Boston, Chicago, Toronto, appear in company announcements but not in live role listings. Candidates should ask recruiters which location a role sits in and how often cross-office collaboration happens in person versus over the digital layer.

First Principles, Not Slogans

EliseAI's own engineering and research page frames the work in terms that double as a cultural filter: "build from first principles," "take responsibility for difficult problems that don't yet have answers," and "own architecture, implementation, and outcomes." Those phrases describe the daily reality of shipping AI that runs lease renewals, maintenance dispatch, and patient scheduling in highly regulated environments. After that round led by a16z in 2025, the company is expanding the same agentic stack into healthcare. The company's career site emphasizes that reliability, performance, and correctness are "table stakes" — not aspirations.

Low-Ego Collaboration

The board data shows 87 salaried roles across those functions, with a median posted band of $210k.

Mission as Constraint

That process assesses "mission alignment" alongside problem-solving. Rapid iteration, clear impact, and regulatory-grade craft run through every role description on the board, from the Staff Software Engineer band ($300k–$400k) to the Strategic Sales Manager band ($400k–$450k).

The Receptionist's Desk

Minna Song sat at a Manhattan front desk in 2017 and watched the phone ring unanswered. She saw maintenance requests fall through cracks, lease renewals missed, renters give up and move out. The AI platform that now handles that share of U.S. apartments started there — not in a lab, but in the lobby, listening to the conversations that never happened. The next hire will walk into 401 Fifth Avenue, or 425 California Street, or 501 Boylston Street, and pick up where that receptionist left off: turning missed calls into leased units, missed appointments into kept ones, missed signals into systems that don't miss.

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