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Employee Spotlight: Meet Elyas, Pangram's Founding Engineer!

Bradley Emi
October 1, 2025
Meet Elyas Masrour, Founding AI Engineer!

Welcome to our first Employee Spotlight! Today we're featuring Elyas, one of Pangram's founding engineers who has been instrumental in developing our core AI detection technologies.

Tell us about yourself and your role at Pangram.

I'm Elyas, one of the founding engineers here at Pangram! I've worked on a bunch of our core features including Humanizer robustness, AI phrases, plagiarism detection, Role-Based Access Controls, LMS integrations, and most recently, detection of mixed human and AI content. It's been exciting to help build these technologies from the ground up.

How did you first get into computer science and AI?

As a kid, I was always building things – whether it was Legos, blocks, or anything I could get my hands on. One year for Christmas I got this big chunky Intel laptop, and suddenly the world of things you could build became so much bigger. In the digital world, you could copy and paste or do a million operations in a second. That's what got me hooked.

I decided to study Computer Engineering at the University of Maryland, and Pangram is my first job out of school.

What drew you to join Pangram specifically?

Three main reasons. First, I got some great advice that you should work with the most amazing people you can. The founding team here – Bradley and Max – were incredibly strong and had so much to teach me. Second, I was really interested in being early-stage. When I joined, we were only four people, which gave me tremendous ownership and the ability to work on really impactful projects right from the start.

Third, it was an opportunity to use the skills I'd spent four years learning in a way that felt productive and beneficial to society. I do feel passionate that preserving some spaces for human voices will only become more important, and this felt like a good way to work on something I genuinely believed in.

What's your favorite thing about being an AI engineer?

My favorite thing is that the landscape is completely unsettled. There's no direct path, no one specific way to do things – everything is discovery. The difference between engineering and research becomes blurred because you get to experiment constantly, from early project phases where you're testing if something is even possible, all the way to deployment and getting it out to users. The fact that the field is so young and rapidly moving is probably my favorite part.

Walk us through a typical day at Pangram.

I try to get up early and get some exercise in before taking the G train to our office in downtown Brooklyn. I usually have about an hour to an hour and a half of deep work in the morning when not many people are around yet. Then we do standup where we sync on what everybody's doing. We have lunch, get some more deep work in during the afternoon, sometimes have meetings with product people or sales, and then get in another stretch of solo work before heading home.

We see you eating so many bananas in the office – how many bananas do you consume daily, and when?

[Laughs] There are a lot of bananas! There are so many slots in a day for bananas – you can do a banana when you get in, a post-standup banana, a banana right before you leave. I'm big on bananas, but not too early if there's any green on them. Many people would say my banana consumption happens a little too late in the banana cycle – bananas have to be ripe!

What are your favorite AI models and tools?

I'm definitely in the Cursor ecosystem – that's where I start most of my work. As with many engineers, I enjoy the Anthropic models more than OpenAI. I feel like the GPT series is very deferential and tells you what you want to hear, while Claude will sometimes stick up for itself a bit more. I use Claude 3.5 and 4 all day long.

Outside of work, I like to tinker with ChatGPT's image generation, I play around with Veo sometimes, and NotebookLM is a really cool product as well.

What career accomplishment are you most proud of?

I'll split this into two things. In terms of actual work I'm most proud of, we did extensive work around Humanizer detection last year. Getting to publish a paper and present it in person in Abu Dhabi, talking about how humanizers are being used, how they distort text, and how we can build a path toward detecting them – that was really the culmination of a lot of hard work.

For the coolest moment in my career, during my internship at NASA-JPL, I got to work directly on the Curiosity Mars Rover team. One afternoon, I got to sit down with the “uplink team” (the engineers putting together the commands for Curiosity). They actually let me enter a sequence of commands that took a large panorama. So I can say that I took a picture on Mars, which is pretty cool!

A picture of Mars from NASA-JPL

The image I took! from NASA-JPL/Caltech

What's the funniest thing you've seen come out of an AI model?

I've seen a lot of funny things working with AI models, especially when working with models that are trained to avoid detection and sound more human. But the funniest thing was a screenshot one of our engineer friends posted on Twitter – it was from inside Cursor where Claude said "You’re absolutely right, I've made a mess." That really distills what it sometimes feels like to work in collaboration with AI.

If you had one wish for the future of AI, what would it be?

I would say that I wish for AI that enhances collaboration with humans more than fully replacing them. I'm super excited about AI's potential as a creative tool for expanding human expression, but I'm also very sympathetic to artists and creative people who believe it's a path to replacing them. My hope is that we can build tools that unlock more interesting visuals and ideas, and enable expression in a way that wasn’t available before, rather than just swapping in an AI brain behind creative work.

What do you like to do for fun outside of work?

My primary hobby is making movies – usually about science, sometimes science fiction, sometimes science documentaries, but typically exploring near-future scenarios and the consequences of new technology we're developing. I can show you a film that I wrapped up recently, that coincidentally (or not!) is about AI…

Outside of filmmaking, I love enjoying this beautiful city of New York. I take long walks around Manhattan and Brooklyn. I've been taking up surfing this summer at the Rockaways – there's actually only one beach where you can legally surf in New York City! I just love being outside and enjoying the nature we have here.

As a filmmaker, what are your top three favorite movies?

First, the Steve Jobs movie from Aaron Sorkin – which has so much to say about both technology and the personalities that create it. Second, Jurassic Park, which satisfies the science nerd in me. And my underground pick is the original "What We Do in the Shadows" – it's a mockumentary about four vampires living together in an apartment in New Zealand, and it might be the funniest two hours of your entire life.

Finally, what's your advice for someone wanting to get into the AI field?

I have one piece of advice that I learned here at Pangram: “become one with the data." In any AI or ML project, it's all about the data. Get as familiar with the data as possible – scroll through it, read it, really understand it. I've done this for my fair share on Pangram projects, combing through the deep coal mines of common crawl internet data or the absolute trenches of humanizer outputs. If you want to get into AI, start by looking at the data.

Thanks for reading our first Employee Spotlight! Stay tuned for more behind-the-scenes looks at the team building the future of AI detection at Pangram.

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