The posting
A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER
I wrote the first version of this app in Swift and I still open Xcode most weeks. For years the gap between an idea and a build on my phone was measured in sprints. Now I build with agents and it is measured in hours, and the engineers here who work the same way ship more in a week than a squad used to ship in a quarter. The iOS app is where millions of people find out what is happening around them, in the moment it matters. I want the person who owns it to be an exceptional iOS engineer first, to run agents like a second pair of hands, and to care that it works on one bar of signal in a crowd. If that is you, I want to build the next version with you, next to me.
ABOUT
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.
The iOS app is where all of it lands: the alert that arrives in seconds, the map, the live video from the scene, the broadcast a user starts with one tap, the Premium and Protect experiences that fund the mission. You will own real pieces of that app, and you will ship them with a small team of engineers, human and agent, holding the bar for what a real-time safety product on iOS should feel like.
Some of what you build is for the people inside Citizen who run the city. Our Mission Control and real-time operations team uses an operator tool that lives in the iOS repo all day. They are exacting users and they will tell you the truth.
WHY NOW
Citizen is about to reinvent the product, not redesign it. Eight years of shipping have left an app that does a great deal and hangs together less well than it should. The next version is live, ambient, and personal: the system watches the city so the user does not have to. That gets built on iOS first, in New York, by a very small number of engineers using agents to do the production work. The base and the distribution are earned. The rebuild is yours to ship.
HOW WE WORK
Every role at Citizen is two things: the craft, and the operation of AI to multiply it.
You are an iOS engineer first. Swift fluency, taste in architecture, a feel for performance on a real phone in a real crowd, and the judgment to know what a live safety product must never do. You are also the person who runs agents to write, review, test, and instrument the code alongside you. You propose where agents run alone; production gates are policy, because this is a safety product. You hold the bar on quality and you keep the hard calls for yourself. If in month three you are still hand-writing boilerplate, reducers, or test scaffolding, something has gone wrong.
How work is organized. Engineering runs on a driver and builder model. Every initiative is a drive with one accountable driver who owns scope, sequencing, and tradeoffs, and a small set of builders who ship it with them. Drivers are not assigned by seniority; they are the people who want the decision and the responsibility that comes with it. You will build on other people's drives and you will drive your own, early.
Release Captain. iOS ships weekly. Release Captain is a rotational program: when it is your week, you run the release end to end and land high-priority bug fixes on a severity-based timeline, typically within one to two days. Everyone on the team takes the rotation.
The stack, so you can self-select now. Swift 6 with strict concurrency, The Composable Architecture (TCA), a modular Swift Package Manager codebase, and a weekly release train with phased rollout, crash triage, and a defined hotfix path.
WHAT YOU WILL OWN
We are not hiring a sole authority over the app. We are hiring someone dedicated, who wants ownership and can carry it, over a real piece of the core product, chosen by the team's need first and your interest second, and who is equally willing to own new features and new surfaces where they move the company's growth and current focus. The pieces on the table today:
Live video and broadcast. Capture, upload, and playback of live video from the scene, including the one-tap path from "something is happening" to "I am live." Latency and reliability under real network conditions.
Real-time alerts and the map. Push notifications that arrive in seconds, location and geofencing that are accurate and battery-aware, and a map that stays fast with thousands of live incidents on it.
The paid experience. Premium, Protect, onboarding, the paywall, and the experiments that run on them, in partnership with Design and Product. Every consumer dollar has an iOS decision behind it.
Operator tooling. The internal tool in the iOS repo that Mission Control uses. When it is slow, the city hears about it late.
App health and release. Cold start, battery, memory, crash-free sessions, behavior on one bar of signal, and the weekly train, phased rollout, crash triage, and hotfix path in the Release Captain rotation.
Whichever piece you take, two things come with it:
Instrumentation. Registering analytics events with the data team, checking they land in the warehouse, and making sure the funnel leadership reads is the funnel the app produced.
The agent loop. The agents that draft, review, test, and instrument iOS code at Citizen. Skills are already wired into the iOS repo; you take them over, extend them, propose where they run alone, and raise the output bar. You work daily with backend on the real-time contracts, with Design on what ships, with Product on what to build, with Data on events, and with Mission Control as an internal user.
YOUR FIRST 90 DAYS
- Days 1–30. Use the app every day in New York. Go live. Read the codebase. Ship to production in week one. Shadow a Release Captain week. Identify the three things that hurt users most and start on the first.
- Days 31–60. Run your first Release Captain week solo. Drive your first initiative end to end. Land one measurable improvement in performance or reliability. Take over one of the agent loops already in the repo, extend it, and propose the first one to run without a human, in test generation or code review.
- Days 61–90. Ship the first piece of the reinvented product to real users. Present the roadmap for the pieces you own, with the numbers behind it.
HOW SUCCESS IS MEASURED
- Crash-free sessions, cold start, and battery impact, against a plan you own
- Time from alert creation to notification on device, and live video start time, both improving
- Release cadence, and time to land high-priority fixes during your Release Captain weeks
- Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 retention and paid conversion on the surfaces you ship, jointly with Product and Design
- Event coverage and accuracy in the warehouse for the surfaces you own
- Cycle time from idea to App Store on the surfaces you own, falling as the agent loops you run carry more of the work
WHO YOU ARE
- You have shipped and owned a consumer iOS app used by millions, and you can point to what you personally built in it.
- You are deep in Swift and the Apple platform: Swift 6 concurrency, networking, background execution, location, push, camera and video. You know where iOS will fight you and how to win.
- You have worked in The Composable Architecture or a comparable unidirectional architecture at scale, and in a modular SPM codebase, and you have opinions about both.
- You have run a release: CI, beta distribution, phased rollout, crash triage, hotfixes. You know what a bad Thursday looks like.
- You have worked on real-time or live media and you know what latency, jitter, and a bad network do to a user's trust.
- 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.
- You measure. You instrument before you argue, and you check that the event landed in the warehouse before you trust the chart.
- High agency. Handed a direction, you come back with a better one. You want to drive, not only build.
- You care about the mission. Safety is a real thing that happens to real people on their worst day, and you build the app like it matters.
- You want to be in New York, in the office, every day. The job does not work any other way.
COMPENSATION
Base salary of $200,000–$260,000 per year, plus equity.
Compensation here is deliberately above market. The new normal is one person, working with agents, carrying what an engineering team used to carry. That person is rare, and we pay for the person, not the band. Meet the bar and we will comp you accordingly, in salary and in equity. We would rather one person own a real piece of Citizen than eight own a slice each. Full numbers in the first conversation.
