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

Who decides

a founder or department head

Best channel

LinkedIn or direct email

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.

Avoid

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.

• ✕

  Don't open with what you want. Open with what AIR is dealing with right now — 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 what you'd do about it.

• ✕

  Most AI applications get ghosted. A day-five follow-up can double your response rate.

We don't yet have verified candidate reports for AIR. What follows is the typical process for a <50-person AI company, so treat it as a model, not confirmed detail.

Interview stages

1. 1

   Intro Call

   Video call · 30 min

   What it testsCulture fit and role expectations
   Usually run byFounder or hiring manager
2. 2

   Technical Deep Dive

   Video call or in-person · 60 min

   What it testsPast projects and problem-solving approach
   Usually run byTechnical founder or lead
3. 3

   Final Round

   In-person or video · 45 min

   What it testsTeam fit and offer discussion
   Usually run byFounding team