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Salary: USD 185,000 - 245,000 / annual
Citizen is the #1 safety app in the U.S., with thousands of live videos captured at real incidents and distributed in real time to users across every major American city. The iOS app is the core product surface where alerts arrive in seconds, live video streams, broadcasts, and premium experiences land for millions of users.
You will own a real piece of the core iOS product—one of several areas: live video and broadcast (capture, upload, playback, and the one-tap path to going live); real-time alerts and mapping (push notifications, geofencing, and map performance at scale); the paid experience (Premium, Protect, onboarding, paywall, and GrowthBook experiments); Citizen Live (the operator tool used by Mission Control); or app health and release (cold start, battery, memory, crash-free sessions, and the weekly release train).
You are an iOS engineer first, with deep Swift fluency, architectural taste, and a feel for performance on real phones in real conditions. You are also the person who runs AI agents to write, review, test, and instrument 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 keep the hard calls for yourself.
Engineering runs on a driver and builder model. Every initiative has one accountable driver who owns scope and tradeoffs, and a small set of builders who ship it. Drivers are not assigned by seniority; they are the people who want the decision and responsibility. You will build on others' drives and drive your own, early. iOS ships weekly via a rotational Release Captain 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.
The stack: Swift 6 with strict concurrency, The Composable Architecture (TCA), modular Swift Package Manager codebase, Bitrise and fastlane for CI, TestFlight, phased rollout, Sentry and Crashlytics for crash triage, GrowthBook for experiments, and Segment analytics into BigQuery.
In your first 90 days: Days 1–30, use the app daily in New York, read the codebase, ship to production in week one, shadow a Release Captain, and identify the three things that hurt users most. 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, and take over one agent loop already in the repo. Days 61–90, ship the first piece of the reinvented product to real users and present the roadmap for your pieces with numbers behind it.
Success is measured by: crash-free sessions, cold start, and battery impact against a plan you own; time from alert creation to notification and live video start time, both improving; release cadence and time to land high-priority fixes during Release Captain weeks; Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 retention and paid conversion on surfaces you ship; event coverage and accuracy in the warehouse; and cycle time from idea to App Store falling as agent loops carry more work.
Citizen is reinventing the product, not redesigning it. Eight years of shipping have left an app that does a great deal but 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.
REQUIREMENTS:
- You have shipped and owned a consumer iOS app used by millions, and can point to what you personally built in it.
- Deep expertise 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.
- Experience working in The Composable Architecture or comparable unidirectional architecture at scale, and in a modular SPM codebase, with opinions about both.
- You have run a release: CI, TestFlight, phased rollout, crash triage, hotfixes. You know what a bad Thursday looks like.
- Experience working on real-time or live media; you know what latency, jitter, and bad networks do to user trust.
- You build with AI already. You have replaced whole parts of your own workflow with agents, have opinions about where they fail, and 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.
