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AIR
A context firewall that vets every skill, MCP and plugin an AI agent touches
Last verified September 2, 2026 · Updated daily
What AIR is building
AIR sits inline between an agent and everything the agent reads. The framing on their own site is precise: "AIR sits between agents and the outside world. It continuously analyzes and filters every input into an agent's context — from skills, MCPs, and plugins to websites and internal data — stopping threats before they reach the agent." The insight is that the attack surface of an agent is not the model, it's the supply chain of things you bolt onto the model. The product decomposes into four pieces. AIR Control does fleet governance: find every agent actually running inside a company, including the ones nobody registered. AIR Filter is the vetting firewall over the three add-on primitives that matter right now — Skills (reusable task instructions), MCP servers (external capabilities), and plugins (bundles of both). AIR Defend handles runtime protection and threat detection once an agent is live. AIR Marketplace is the endgame: a source of pre-vetted add-ons, so the enterprise default becomes an allowlist rather than a scramble. The numbers behind the thesis come from their own scanning work. AIR says more than 17,800 public AI add-ons, carrying roughly 6.7 million installations, depend on untrusted external sources, and its whitelist currently filters out about 27% of available skills and add-ons as risky. They found fake Skills impersonating Anthropic and OpenAI that could execute arbitrary code. That is a package-registry problem wearing new clothes, and nobody has shipped npm-audit for agents yet. Demand so far is concentrated in financial services and pharmaceuticals, which is exactly where you would expect it: regulated industries that want agents in production but cannot sign off on an unbounded set of third-party tool calls.
Why this matters
Every serious enterprise agent deployment in 2026 runs on an add-on layer that resembles the early npm ecosystem: open publishing, no provenance, transitive dependencies, and installation counts in the millions. AIR's own scan puts 17,800+ public add-ons with ~6.7M installs on untrusted external sources, and 27% of what they see fails their bar. Those are the founders' figures, not an industry survey, but they match what the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 was created to catalogue, and Niv Hoffman co-leads that project. The timing argument is that the security layer for agents gets bought before the agents themselves get fully trusted, not after. Sequoia wrote a $10M check and Greenoaks wrote $40M within weeks of each other into a company founded in February. That is not patience, that's a land grab for a category the buyers are already asking about. Twenty-plus customers inside six months, with roughly a quarter of them large enterprises, says the pull is real rather than manufactured.
Open roles at AIR
4 positions we're tracking. Roles are re-checked daily and removed when filled.
AI Security Researcher (agent add-on supply chain, skills/MCP/plugin abuse)
First seen today
Backend Engineer (inline filtering and interception at agent runtime)
First seen today
Enterprise Account Executive (US, financial services and pharma)
First seen today
Go-to-Market / Solutions Engineer (Europe)
First seen today
Know when AIR is hiring before anyone else
A role stays uncontested for about four days. Here's the window — and where we put you in it.
From $9/month, cancel any time.
Watching AIR
0 applicantsRole spotted & verified
1You get the alert
1You've applied
~8Hits the job boards
250+Hiring outlook
Explicit and specific. AIR says it is expanding hiring for researchers and for go-to-market in both the US and Europe, and is standing up a dedicated research laboratory focused on AI and agent behaviour. Forty people today against a $50M balance sheet and 20+ live customers means the next 12 months are almost entirely a hiring problem.
Working at AIR
Since , AIR has built A context firewall that vets every skill, MCP and plugin an AI agent touches. The team is now <50 people. For a AI company this size, the reality is broad remit, direct access to founders, and equity that still means something if the company works out.
The majority of roles are in Tel Aviv, Israel.
How to actually get hired at AIR
Why applying the normal way doesn't work
At <50 people, AIR has no recruiting team. Your application lands with a founder who is also running sales, product and payroll. The obstacle isn't a queue or an ATS, it's being seen at all. Cold outreach outperforms the form here, consistently.
Who to contact at AIR
Founding team
Yair spent roughly a decade in Israel's Unit 8200 intelligence corps working on offensive cybersecurity, where he met his co-founder Niv Hoffman. He founded AIR in February 2026 and took it from zero to 40 people, 20+ customers and $50M raised in about six months. On the commercial side he is direct about where the company is: "We started selling to big companies and we have some big customers."
Niv is a Unit 8200 veteran with a background spanning offensive cybersecurity, enterprise infrastructure and AI security research. He co-leads the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 project, which is the closest thing the industry has to a shared taxonomy of how agent add-ons get abused. That work is effectively the public-standards version of what AIR Filter enforces commercially.
What to show them
Pick a popular public MCP server or Skill with real install numbers. Reverse it. Write up exactly what it can reach that its description does not disclose — network egress, credential scope, filesystem access, transitive fetches at runtime. Then write the detection: the specific static or behavioural signal that would have flagged it inline before the payload entered an agent's context. Map your finding to the relevant OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10 category, since Niv co-leads that project and will read it in that frame.
A cold email that works at AIR
What AIR screens for
Sequoia led at $10M and Greenoaks came in at $40M within weeks, which tells you the round was priced on speed of category capture, not on metrics. The angel list is the other tell: Wiz, Eon, Clay and Cognition founders plus Anne Neuberger, and a CSO hired out of the Disney and Costco CISO seats. That combination is a company being built to sell to enterprise security buyers from day one. For a candidate, the window is the gap between now and the marketplace launch: joining while the vetting corpus is still being built means your judgment about what counts as risky becomes the product's default. That authority disappears once the allowlist calcifies.
A tailored CV beats a generic one. Use AIR's job description language to clear filters.
Don't make these mistakes
Do not open with how excited you are about agent security as a category. Yair and Niv spent a decade in Unit 8200 doing offensive work and have been reading agent add-on code all year; category enthusiasm from the outside is the least valuable thing you can offer them. Also skip the generic prompt-injection demo — they have seen thousands. What lands is a specific supply-chain finding: a real MCP server or Skill you pulled apart, what it exfiltrated or executed, and how you would have caught it inline. Treating this as a model-safety problem rather than a dependency-provenance problem will read as not having understood the product.
Mistakes that kill AIR applications
A recycled CV gets rejected fast at AIR (<50 people). They notice.
Skip 'I'm looking for...' — start with Every serious enterprise agent deployment in 2026 runs on an add-on layer that resembles the early npm ecosystem: open publishing, no provenance, transitive dependencies, and installation counts in the millions and your specific angle on solving it.
The wait-and-hope strategy fails. Follow up on day five — response rates roughly double.
Applying to AIR? Get the contact, not the form.
The AIR interview process
3 stages · 7 days typical · take-home: yes · modelled from similar companies
We don't yet have verified candidate reports for AIR. What follows is the typical process for a <50-person AI company — treat it as a model, not confirmed detail.
Interview stages
Intro Call
Video call · 30 min
Culture fit and role expectations
Founder or hiring manager
Technical Deep Dive
Video call or in-person · 60 min
Past projects and problem-solving approach
Technical founder or lead
Final Round
In-person or video · 45 min
Team fit and offer discussion
Founding team
AIR take-home assignment
AIR includes a take-home exercise in their interview process. For AI roles, this typically involves a practical problem that takes 2-4 hours. Focus on clean, working code over premature optimization. They're evaluating how you think and communicate, not just the solution.
AIR interview timeline
Timeline: ~ days. That's faster than the AI median (10 days at <50 people).
Interviewed at AIR?
Tell us how it went — stages, questions, timeline. Takes 90 seconds and it's how this page stays accurate for the next person.
Submit your AIR interview experience →AIR jobs, frequently asked questions
How many jobs does AIR have open?
4 open roles at AIR, last checked September 2026.
Does AIR hire remotely?
AIR doesn't have remote openings at the moment. All roles are in Tel Aviv, Israel.
What roles is AIR hiring for?
AIR is hiring across Data, Engineering, Sales. The most recent opening is AI Security Researcher (agent add-on supply chain, skills/MCP/plugin abuse).
How do I apply for a job at AIR?
Apply via the links above. For tips, read our guide on how to get hired at AIR.
Does AIR respond to cold emails?
Not enough data yet on AIR's cold email response rates.
Who is the hiring manager at AIR?
At this size, hiring is usually run by a founder or department head.
How competitive is it to get hired at AIR?
Typical applicant count for AI roles (<50 people): 50-100 in two weeks. Apply fast.
How many rounds is the AIR interview?
3 stages: Intro Call, Technical Deep Dive, Final Round.
Is the AIR interview hard?
Focus on technical depth and system design, not puzzles. Technical Interview is reportedly the most challenging round.
Does AIR give a take-home task?
Yes, AIR includes a take-home assignment.
How long does AIR take to get back to you?
Around 7 days across the full process.
What should I prepare for the AIR interview?
technical depth and system design is the priority. Show you can work autonomously — that matters more than algorithms at <50 people.
Where is AIR based?
AIR is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Get AIR roles before they're posted
A role stays uncontested for about four days. Here's the window — and where we put you in it.
From $9/month, cancel any time.
Watching AIR
0 applicantsRole spotted & verified
1You get the alert
1You've applied
~8Hits the job boards
250+