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Joseph Sirosh, CTO of artificial intelligence for Microsoft, has joined Compass. (GeekWire Photo / Taylor Soper)

Tech companies poach talent from each other all the time, but it’s not every day that you see a tech giant lose a top executive to a real estate brokerage.

Joseph Sirosh, who has been with Microsoft for the last five years, most recently as the chief technology officer for the company’s artificial intelligence efforts, joined New York-based Compass as CTO. The well-funded company aims to use technology to simplify home buying and selling.

Compass announced the addition of Sirosh in a tweet yesterday, saying he will lead its engineering team, with an emphasis on AI products.

Sirosh responded to Compass with a tweet of his own, expressing his excitement to join the company.

In addition to leading Microsoft’s AI efforts, Sirosh also worked on the company’s cloud, data and machine learning projects. Before joining Microsoft, he spent close to nine years at Amazon as a VP in multiple parts of the company, most recently the Global Inventory Platform.

Compass competes in a crowded field of companies looking to simplify the home buying and selling processes, including Seattle heavyweights Zillow and Redfin. Compass has raised more than $1.2 billion, and it entered the Seattle market earlier this year.

Compass is helmed by Co-founder and CEO Robert Reffkin, a former COO at Goldman Sachs. The other founder, Ori Allon, spent time at Twitter and Google after selling startups to the tech giants.



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