About Citizen

Citizen is a free app that keeps you and your loved ones safe. It is a powerful force for good that has already evacuated people from burning buildings, diverted school buses from nearby terrorist attacks and reunited missing children with their parents.

Using our unique technology, 911 alerts are made available to the public and are accompanied by live stories, real-time updates, and user-generated content to provide you with the information you need to protect yourself and your loved ones. We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe. And we’re just getting started.

This year Citizen will expand further across the United States with the express mission of making your world a safer place. We’re looking for hardworking, mission-driven individuals to help take the Citizen app to the next level as we scale up nationwide. With a group of passionate builders from Facebook, Square, Uber, Google and HQ Trivia, Citizen is the company your current company doesn’t want you to know about.

Citizen is backed by Sequoia Capital, 8VC, and Founders Fund and has raised tens of millions in VC funding.

Our Challenges

  • Scaling: We have one of the fastest-growing organic user bases in NYC, and have expanded to multiple other cities. We are focused on the nationwide launch and the need to support that scale. A Citizen international launch will follow.
  • Bursting: We designed our infrastructure to scale without notice in case of a spontaneous incident where we need to inform our entire user base. On significant events, we see over a million simultaneously connected clients and their associated live streams. The core systems need to be able to efficiently support these traffic patterns and continue to scale to millions of more users in the future.
  • Machine learning: We process thousands of hours of audio every day looking for incidents that impact our users’ safety. To do this at scale, we’ve built ML models for audio analysis and targeting using the current state of the art from academia.
  • Analytics: We want to alert users to the incidents that matter to them, in a way that scales across different geographic densities and demographics.
  • Mobile video streaming: Our app will ingest high-quality video at low-latency, transcode, and redistribute the video to external media outlets seamlessly.
  • Radio hardware: We build our own software-defined radio-based devices to consume all radio dispatch in every major city, whether analog or digital.

Our Stack - languages and technologies we use and teach

    • Mobile: Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android)
    • Web: React.js, TypeScript
    • Services: Go for transactional systems; Python for analytical systems
    • Datastores: Cassandra, MySQL, Redis, Google PubSub
    • Infrastructure: Kubernetes on Google Cloud

Role Description

    • Develop a deep neural network for audio flagging to improve operational efficiency
    • Develop a Churn model to help determine when a customer is about to churn from Citizen 
    • Help determine how users are targeted for notifications
    • Design feed ranking algorithms to improve business objects, including: Shares, Sign-ups, etc.
    • Develop models for moderating video content (TV/Games, No content, etc.) 
    • Select best thumbnails from a list of videos and ranking videos within an incident

Preferred Qualifications

    • Computer Science degree or Machine Learning related degree; or equivalent work experience in the field
    • Good theoretical grounding in core Machine Learning concepts and techniques
    • Ability to reason about and grasp the intuition behind fundamental principles of Linear Algebra, Statistics, Probability
    • Experience with a number of ML techniques and frameworks, e.g. data discretization, normalization, sampling, linear regression, decision trees, SVMs, deep neural networks, etc
    • Familiarity with one or more DL software frameworks such as TensorFlow, PyTorch
    • 3+ years experience leading and delivering effective ML solutions for large scale production use cases

Citizen offers a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts, unlimited PTO, company holidays, stock options, commuter benefits, lunch daily, weekly team dinners, regular team outings, guest speakers, and lots more! 

 Citizen is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all.

Apply for this Job

* Required
  
Attach Dropbox Google Drive Paste

U.S. Equal Opportunity Employment Information (Completion is voluntary)

Individuals seeking employment at Citizen are considered without regards to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, veteran status, gender identity, or sexual orientation. You are being given the opportunity to provide the following information in order to help us comply with federal and state Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action record keeping, reporting, and other legal requirements.

Completion of the form is entirely voluntary. Whatever your decision, it will not be considered in the hiring process or thereafter. Any information that you do provide will be recorded and maintained in a confidential file.

Race & Ethnicity Definitions

If you believe you belong to any of the categories of protected veterans listed below, please indicate by making the appropriate selection. As a government contractor subject to Vietnam Era Veterans Readjustment Assistance Act (VEVRAA), we request this information in order to measure the effectiveness of the outreach and positive recruitment efforts we undertake pursuant to VEVRAA. Classification of protected categories is as follows:

A "disabled veteran" is one of the following: a veteran of the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service who is entitled to compensation (or who but for the receipt of military retired pay would be entitled to compensation) under laws administered by the Secretary of Veterans Affairs; or a person who was discharged or released from active duty because of a service-connected disability.

A "recently separated veteran" means any veteran during the three-year period beginning on the date of such veteran's discharge or release from active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval, or air service.

An "active duty wartime or campaign badge veteran" means a veteran who served on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service during a war, or in a campaign or expedition for which a campaign badge has been authorized under the laws administered by the Department of Defense.

An "Armed forces service medal veteran" means a veteran who, while serving on active duty in the U.S. military, ground, naval or air service, participated in a United States military operation for which an Armed Forces service medal was awarded pursuant to Executive Order 12985.

Form CC-305

OMB Control Number 1250-0005

Expires 05/31/2023

Voluntary Self-Identification of Disability

Why are you being asked to complete this form?

We are a federal contractor or subcontractor required by law to provide equal employment opportunity to qualified people with disabilities. We are also required to measure our progress toward having at least 7% of our workforce be individuals with disabilities. To do this, we must ask applicants and employees if they have a disability or have ever had a disability. Because a person may become disabled at any time, we ask all of our employees to update their information at least every five years.

Identifying yourself as an individual with a disability is voluntary, and we hope that you will choose to do so. Your answer will be maintained confidentially and not be seen by selecting officials or anyone else involved in making personnel decisions. Completing the form will not negatively impact you in any way, regardless of whether you have self-identified in the past. For more information about this form or the equal employment obligations of federal contractors under Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, visit the U.S. Department of Labor’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

How do you know if you have a disability?

You are considered to have a disability if you have a physical or mental impairment or medical condition that substantially limits a major life activity, or if you have a history or record of such an impairment or medical condition.

Disabilities include, but are not limited to:

  • Autism
  • Autoimmune disorder, for example, lupus, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, or HIV/AIDS
  • Blind or low vision
  • Cancer
  • Cardiovascular or heart disease
  • Celiac disease
  • Cerebral palsy
  • Deaf or hard of hearing
  • Depression or anxiety
  • Diabetes
  • Epilepsy
  • Gastrointestinal disorders, for example, Crohn's Disease, or irritable bowel syndrome
  • Intellectual disability
  • Missing limbs or partially missing limbs
  • Nervous system condition for example, migraine headaches, Parkinson’s disease, or Multiple sclerosis (MS)
  • Psychiatric condition, for example, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, PTSD, or major depression

1Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended. For more information about this form or the equal employment obligations of Federal contractors, visit the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP) website at www.dol.gov/ofccp.

PUBLIC BURDEN STATEMENT: According to the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1995 no persons are required to respond to a collection of information unless such collection displays a valid OMB control number. This survey should take about 5 minutes to complete.