Citizen
Senior Backend Engineer
$200K–$260K
New York City · On-site · Senior · Full-time · Posted Sep 24, 2026
About the job
Own and ship backend systems powering Citizen’s real-time safety pipeline, live video, internal operations tools, and enterprise products, while using AI agents to improve development and operations.
What you'll do
- Build, operate, and improve core backend services, including incident ingestion, verification, geolocation, distribution, live video, and enterprise APIs.
- Extend and operate AI-agent workflows for writing, reviewing, testing, and operating backend code; develop AI capabilities in the incident pipeline with evaluation and safeguards.
- Measure system performance and reliability, support Mission Control and partner teams, and participate in the on-call rotation.
What they ask for
- Experience building and running consumer-scale, real-time or event-driven backend systems, with personally owned services.
- Fluency in Go; comfort with Python, Kubernetes, and a modern cloud stack.
- Prior pager/on-call responsibility for a system people depend on.
- Already using AI agents in engineering workflows; able to work in the New York office every day.
Nice to have
- Experience with live video or streaming infrastructure.
- Production experience with ML models or LLMs, including evaluation, fallbacks, and audit.
Pay
$200,000–$260,000 per year (USD, base salary)
Tools
Go, Python, Kubernetes
AI focus
Use and improve agents for code authoring, review, testing, and operations; build AI into incident detection and verification, with evaluation, provenance, guardrails, and audited stages toward autonomous operation.
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