Product Designer, AI Operator

The posting, as Citizen wrote it

A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER

I design. I always have. For years I did it with a small team and a lot of late nights, and it got Citizen to millions of people. Now I do it with agents, and the gap between an idea and a working build on my phone is measured in hours. I need one designer who works that way with me: someone with real taste who would rather ship the prototype than polish the deck, and who is willing to own what people pay for, not just what they see. You will get direct feedback from me, and I want it back. You will also see your work in front of millions of people faster than anywhere else you have been.

THE ROLE

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.

We are rebuilding Citizen as an AI-native company. Engineering and operations already run with AI agents working alongside humans. Product design is next, and you will define what that looks like.

You will be the senior product designer for Citizen's consumer mobile experience and the product owner of its revenue surface, reporting directly to the Founder and CEO, who designs alongside you. There is no product manager between you and the subscription business. Four outcomes are yours: a product people open every day rather than only on a bad one, interfaces that make real-time video and live safety feel effortless on a phone, a subscription experience that converts and keeps people, and a design operation where agents do the production work while you do the thinking. You inherit a product used by millions, a brand people recognize, a founder who cares about pixels, and the mandate to build the category's next chapter rather than polish its last one.

You set the bar with your own work first. The design team is small today, and as it grows you will help shape how it works and who it needs.

WHY NOW

Citizen built the public safety category and became the #1 safety app in the country. The next chapter is not a redesign of that product. It is a different kind of product: live, AI-native, ambient, and personal, built on the base and the distribution the first chapter earned. The person in this seat decides what safety looks like on a phone when an agent is watching the city for you. Almost nobody gets to invent a category twice from a real base with real distribution. You will.

WHAT "APPLIED AI" MEANS HERE

You are a product designer first. The craft is the job: judgment, taste, the ability to look at forty variants and know which one is right and why. Anyone can generate options now. Almost nobody can choose.

You are also the person who builds and runs the agents that do the production work. Variants by the dozen before lunch, assets at every size and locale without a human exporting them, a Figma frame tu
[…]
ready. You have opinions about what the tools can and cannot do, you have replaced parts of your own workflow with agents, and you are paying attention to what is next.

• You think in systems: type, color, motion, sound, and how a design language survives contact with a team and a fleet of agents.
• You have owned an outcome, not only a surface. You have run a paywall, pricing, or onboarding test end to end, read the result honestly, and shipped or killed it on the number. You are comfortable being the product manager when there is not one.
• You are fluent in video and motion. Citizen is a live video product; still frames are not enough. You prototype in high fidelity, fast, on a real device. You are comfortable enough with code to get an idea onto a phone without waiting for an engineer. You are not an engineer, and we are not looking for one. You lead by example first, and you want to help a small team do its best work.
• You care about the mission. Safety is a real thing that happens to real people on their worst day, and you design like it matters.
• You make confident decisions without a complete picture, take direct feedback from a founder with strong opinions, and give it back.

THE FIRST CONVERSATION

Bring two things. One thing you made that did not exist before, and one part of your own workflow you replaced with agents. Walk us through both; concise is better. We are listening for taste, for systems, and for whether you think about the business as your own.

COMPENSATION

Base salary of $155,000–$215,000 per year, plus meaningful equity.

Compensation here is deliberately above market. The new normal is one person, working with agents, carrying what a design team used to carry. That person is rare, and we pay for the person, not the band. Meet the bar and we will comp you accordingly, in salary and in equity. We would rather one person own a real piece of Citizen than eight own a slice each. Full numbers in the first conversation.