Senior Backend Engineer

The role

You will own and ship core pieces of a real-time backend system including the real-time pipeline, live video infrastructure, and AI-integrated services. You will work with a small team using agents to build and operate high-scale consumer and enterprise products.

What you will do

• Own a real piece of the core system
• Build and ship real-time pipelines for signal ingestion and distribution
• Manage live video infrastructure
• Integrate AI and models into the pipeline
• Develop internal operator tooling for Mission Control
• Support enterprise, API, and partner integrations
• Manage infrastructure and cost using Go, Python, and Kubernetes
• Register analytics events and instrumentation
• Extend and operate agent loops to write, review, and test code
• Participate in on-call rotations

Required qualifications

• Built and run backend systems at consumer scale, real-time or event-driven
• Fluent in Go
• Comfortable in Python for data pipelines
• At home on Kubernetes and a modern cloud stack including message queues, relational and analytical stores, and observability
• Have carried a pager for a system people depended on
• Build with AI and use agents to replace parts of your workflow
• Measure and instrument work
• High agency
• Want to be in New York, in the office, every day

Nice to have

• Worked on live video or streaming infrastructure
• Put ML models or LLMs into a production path

About the company

Citizen is the #1 safety app in the U.S. It is a live network, newsroom, and safety tool that distributes real-time video and incident data to millions of devices.