Been a very long time since I posted on here and my perspective has evolved a lot since I had my first analyst gig out of college. Over the years I've received a lot of private messages about E&Fs and tried to respond to them all, but I'm sure I missed some. Happy to explain why working for an E&F is the best job in finance, discuss the day-to-day or career path, or answer questions for those on the GP side who don't get as much exposure to their LPs.
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Not every place is the same but everyone tends to follow the same themes. You'll have anywhere from 1-4ish interviews focused on fit, why investing, and why endowments in particular. If it's a smaller team you'll meet with everyone. If larger then you may only meet with some during the process. After this you'll move on to a case study that typically involves evaluating a manager or investment opportunity. I've seen everything from here is all the data from XYZ PE firm's funds 1 to 3 put together an analysis and tell us your conclusion to here are a few letters to LPs write a synopsis and your conclusions. For first part biggest things to nail are why you want to be an investor and why E&Fs specifically. For the case study have conviction in your conclusions but don't try to bs.
If you need prep read Swenson's book Pioneering Portfolio Management and then Ted Seides' book Capital Allocators. You can also listen to Ted's podcast if anyone from the endowment has been on. If not go listen to the old ones with top CIOs.
I think hours are relatively the same across levels so addressing that first. Most people at endowments work 40-50 hours a week. It's an interesting job that doesn't have a ton of heavy hours. If you're working on private deals you can occasionally have fire drills as you typically have a deadline to make your commitment but even then you should have plenty of notice. The one outlier is at the CIO seat. Everywhere I've been the CIO works the most hours. I think that's the nature of being the person in charge of a multi-billion dollar pool of capital.
So comp really varies based on size of the endowment. One nice thing is that all nonprofit tax returns are public records and they include the salaries of the most compensated employees. At a minimum you can always find out a CIO's comp and typically 3-7 investment team salaries. For example you can see MIT's here https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/42103594 which has 6 team members in 7 figures. You can use this website to look at any E&F you want. Even if you only have CIO comp it's a good anchor. Some CIO's only make $500k all-in. Others make $3 million. General rule of thumb: the bigger the endowment the better the pay. All of that being said I think it groups out to the below for E&Fs with full offices. There are outliers on both ends of these ranges.
CIO: $750k to $3 million all-in.
MDs: $600k to $2 million all-in.
Mid Levels: $200k to $500k all-in.
Associates: $100k to $150k + 20 to 50% bonus.
Analysts: $60-90k base + 10% to 30% bonus.
All of this to say endowment MD is one of the best gigs in finance.