Mission Control Specialist, AI Operator

The posting, as Citizen wrote it

A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

Mission Control is where Citizen happens. Every alert that reaches a phone before the sirens do started with a person in Mission Control deciding, in seconds, what a city needs to hear. Nine years in, we publish tens of thousands of incidents a day, often seconds after the first radio call. Nobody else on earth does that.

The work is rapidly evolving. AI now does much of the listening, drafting, and flagging. What the AI cannot do is decide whether an incident gets the whole city's attention, stays on its block, or is not ours to send at all. That judgment is the job, and I want people who hold it like it matters, because it does.

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 media channel, and a safety tool at once, and it is growing.

Mission Control is the engine behind it: the team in Manhattan running incidents across the country, verifying what is real, deciding what people read and who needs to know right now. Every day its decisions reach millions of people, and the communities and partners we work with count on every one of them being right.

THE ROLE

You run a shift in Mission Control, and you run it like you own it. Incidents arrive from first-responder radio, user video, and the AI tooling that surfaces them. You have full domain over what goes out on your shift: what posts, what does not, how it reads, and who sees it. On a big day you are the person who takes a neighborhood story citywide at the right minute, with words people actually stop and read. On a quiet day you are the person who declines to.

This is a public safety job. It is also a media one. The best people in Mission Control move like a dispatcher, write like the sharpest account on the internet, and never send something wide just because it would travel.

WHY NOW

Citizen built the public safety category, at volume, and it worked. AI now carries more of the routine every month. That makes each specialist's judgment and feel for an audience worth more, not less. We are not hiring people to keep up with the feed. We are hiring operators who see what AI already does and think: good, now I can run more. The person who joins now helps shape how Mission Control works for years.

HOW WE WORK

Every role at Citizen is two things: the craft, and the operation of AI to multiply it.

You are an operator first. You direct the AI tooling, you decide what goes out, and you never let it upgrade a rumor into a fact. When something on your shift repeats, you build the workflow that handles it, and you show us. The AI makes you faster. The judgment is yours, and it is measured.

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

Your shift. Run live incidents across every market we cover. Confirm what is real, flag what is not, and keep people aware without feedin
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t, and you can tell the difference between urgent and merely loud. You never upgrade a rumor into a fact, and you say "unconfirmed" without flinching.

You take ownership. Give you the keys to a shift and you run it. You hold a standard when someone louder wants you to drop it, and you can explain why in one sentence.

Deeply mission-aligned. Real people are on the other end of every incident, and you treat that with the seriousness it deserves.

You want this work and this city: on-site in Manhattan, on a shift schedule that includes evenings or a weekend day.

The background we would expect. No single path and no degree required. Strong candidates usually come from one or more of these lanes: social media, content, or community management for a fast-moving brand, creator, or campaign, where you can show what you posted and what it did; audience or engagement roles on a digital news or breaking-news desk; trust and safety or live moderation at scale, where you decided in seconds what millions of people would and would not see; dispatch or public-safety communications. If you have run an account people actually watch, or made a call in under a minute that other people lived with, you already do half this job.

Nice to have: on-camera comfort; Spanish; scanner fluency in a major market; a portfolio of posts, threads, or campaigns you are proud of.

COMPENSATION

Base salary of $70,000 to $85,000 per year, plus stock options in Citizen.

The equity is real. Citizen is venture-backed by some of the best investors in the world, the category we created has no second player, and the company is growing. Everyone in Mission Control owns a piece of what we build next, and we expect that piece to be worth having.

This is a shift-based role. Every schedule includes evenings or a weekend day, and yours is agreed with you before you accept.

Citizen is an equal opportunity employer. If this role excites you and you do not meet every qualification, apply anyway.