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Senior Backend Engineer

Citizen· PEDD
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New York City$200k - $260kFull-timePosted 3w ago

About the role

Citizen’s real-time, AI-native backend systems for ingest, verification, geolocation, and distribution of live safety incidents. You will own core pieces of the real-time pipeline, live video infrastructure, AI-in-pipeline components, internal operator tooling, enterprise/API/partner integrations, and infrastructure, with a focus on correctness, latency, and cost per incident.

Responsibilities

  • Ingest from 911 radio, CAD feeds, user video, and partner feeds; perform detection, verification, geolocation, and distribute to millions of devices in seconds.
  • Build and maintain the live video infrastructure for ingestion, restreaming, and delivery to viewers.
  • Develop AI-in-the-pipeline services: evaluation, provenance, guardrails, and staged paths from human-in-the-loop to autonomous operation behind audited gates.
  • Own internal operator tooling used by Mission Control to verify, write, and publish incidents; ensure performance and reliability for city users.
  • Support Enterprise, API, MCP, and partner integrations; develop and maintain the public API and enterprise access.
  • Maintain and improve infrastructure and cost management using Go and Python services on Kubernetes in a modern cloud stack, with strong observability.
  • Instrument the system with analytics for leadership visibility and align with the data team.
  • Operate and improve the agent loop that drafts, reviews, tests, and operates backend code with cross-team collaboration (iOS/Android contracts, ML models, Data events, Mission Control).

Qualifications

  • Built and run backend systems at consumer scale, real-time or event-driven, with ownership and incident history.
  • Fluent in Go; comfortable with Python for data pipelines; experience with Kubernetes and modern cloud stacks (queues, relational/analytical stores, observability).
  • Experience carrying a pager for a critical system.
  • Experience with live video or streaming infrastructure, or strong aptitude to learn such systems quickly.
  • Experience deploying AI/agents in production paths; understanding of evaluation, fallbacks, and auditing.
  • Ability to instrument and measure events, distinguishing between emitted events and warehouse-received data.
  • High agency with a track record of taking ownership and driving initiatives.
  • Commitment to safety and mission-driven engineering; willingness to be in New York in the office daily.
  • Bonus:Production experience with ML models or LLMs, including evaluation and governance.

Skills

Required:GoPythonKubernetesDistributed systemsAI/Agents
Last updated Oct 14, 2026. Interested? Apply on the company site.
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About Citizen

A safer world starts with you.

Citizen helps you stay safe & informed, by providing instant notifications and live broadcasts of reported crimes and incidents near you.

public safetytechnologyemergency response
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