iOS Engineer, Applied AI

Citizen•New York, NY

14d•Onsite

About The Position

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. 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.

Requirements

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.
Run agents to write, review, test, and instrument the code alongside you.
Propose where agents run alone; production gates are policy, because this is a safety product.
Hold the bar on quality and keep the hard calls for yourself.
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.
Shipped and owned a consumer iOS app used by millions, and can point to what was personally built in it.
Deep in Swift and the Apple platform: Swift 6 concurrency, networking, background execution, location, push, camera and video.
Know where iOS will fight you and how to win.
Worked in The Composable Architecture or a comparable unidirectional architecture at scale, and in a modular SPM codebase, and have opinions about both.
Run a release: CI, TestFlight, phased rollout, crash triage, hotfixes.
Know what a bad Thursday looks like.
Worked on real-time or live media and know what latency, jitter, and a bad network do to a user's trust.
Build with AI already.
Replaced whole parts of your own workflow with agents, have opinions about where they fail, and are paying attention to what is next.
Measure. Instrument before you argue, and check that the event landed in the warehouse before you trust the chart.
High agency. Handed a direction, come back with a better one.
Want to drive, not only build.
Care about the mission. Safety is a real thing that happens to real people on their worst day, and build the app like it matters.
Want to be in New York, in the office, every day.

Nice To Haves

If in month three you are still hand-writing boilerplate, reducers, or test scaffolding, something has gone wrong.

Responsibilities

Own real pieces of the app and ship them with a small team of engineers, human and agent.
Hold the bar for what a real-time safety product on iOS should feel like.
Build on other people's drives and drive your own.
Run the release end to end and land high-priority bug fixes on a severity-based timeline.
Own new features and new surfaces where they move the company's growth and current focus.
Register Segment events with the data team, check they land in BigQuery, and make sure the funnel leadership reads is the funnel the app produced.
Take over agent loops, extend them, and propose where they run alone.
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.
Ship to production in week one.
Shadow a Release Captain week.
Identify the three things that hurt users most and start on the first.
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.
Ship the first piece of the reinvented product to real users.
Present the roadmap for the pieces you own, with the numbers behind it.