Citizen helps you stay safe & informed, by providing instant notifications and live broadcasts of reported crimes and incidents near you. Backed by Sequoia and Lux.
About the role
Citizen is a pipeline before it is an app. Signal comes in from every major American city, gets detected, verified, written, and delivered to the right people in seconds, and the whole thing has to hold when a million people open the app at once because something is happening. For years that took a large backend team. Now I build with agents and so do the engineers here, and a small group working that way out-ships teams five times the size.
What they're looking for
- You have built and run backend systems at consumer scale, real-time or event-driven, and you can point to the services you personally owned and what happened when they broke
- You are fluent in Go, comfortable in Python for the ML and data pipelines, and at home on Kubernetes and a modern cloud stack: message queues, relational and analytical stores, observability
- You have carried a pager for a system people depended on, and you have a story about the worst night
- You have worked on live video or streaming infrastructure, or you want to and can show you learn systems like it fast
- You have put ML models or LLMs into a production path and you know the difference between a demo and a system with evaluation, fallbacks, and audit
- You build with AI already. You have replaced whole parts of your own workflow with agents, you have opinions about where they fail, and you are paying attention to what is next. This is not a nice-to-have. It is the job
More about this role
Citizen is a pipeline before it is an app. Signal comes in from every major American city, gets detected, verified, written, and delivered to the right people in seconds, and the whole thing has to hold when a million people open the app at once because something is happening. For years that took a large backend team. Now I build with agents and so do the engineers here, and a small group working that way out-ships teams five times the size. I want a backend engineer who is exceptional at the craft, runs agents like a second pair of hands, and treats a wrong alert as a bug with consequences. If that is you, come build the real-time system for the next chapter, next to me.
Citizen is the #1 safety app in the U.S. Every day, thousands of videos are captured live at the scene of real incidents and distributed in real time to people in every major American city. No other consumer product has this. It is a live network, a newsroom, and a safety tool at once, and it is growing again.
Underneath it is a real-time system: ingest from 911 radio, CAD feeds, user video, and partner feeds; detection, verification, and geolocation; distribution to millions of devices in seconds; the live video...
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