iOS Engineer, Applied AI

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 Citizen Live, the operator tool that lives in the iOS repo, alongside their web tools 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. Bitrise and fastlane for CI, TestFlight, phased rollout, crash triage in Sentry and Crashlytics, a defined hotfix path. Paywall and onboarding experiments run on GrowthBook. Analytics through Segment into BigQuery.

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…