
Head of Product, Applied AI at Citizen (New York, NY)
Citizen· New York, NY·
Role details
Job description
One person. The whole product. A team of agents, not a team of PMs.
A Note From the Founder I have built product at Citizen since the first line of code, and I am still in it every day. Now I build with agents, and so does the rest of the company. Engineering, operations, and finance already run this way. The gap between an idea and a working build on my phone is measured in hours, and it is changing how fast we move more than anything in our history. We are at an inflection point. We are about to reinvent the product, not redesign it. Eight years of shipping have left us with a product that does a great deal and hangs together less well than it should, and the right person, thinking in whole systems and with agents doing the production work, can make it coherent and sharp in months rather than years. At the same time the enterprise business is working and needs to scale, and the product that made Citizen the #1 safety app in America is going to every country in the world. One person is going to hold all of that in their head and move it. I want to build that next phase with them, next to me, every day. You will hear no from me, and I expect to hear it back, with the data.
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 newsroom, and a safety tool at once, and it is growing again. Under the app is a real-time machine. First-responder radio in every market we cover, video arriving from the scene, a Mission Control floor deciding in seconds what a city hears, and alerts that reach a phone before the sirens do. That machine is becoming agentic. Agents already draft what humans used to transcribe. The next version of Citizen is one where agents listen, verify, write, and route, and people hold the judgment calls that a city's safety deserves. Designing that system, human and agent together, live, at the scale of a country, is the product job here. Nobody has done it before. You are the Head of Product for all of it: the consumer app and its core loops, the subscription business, the enterprise products and API that cities, hospitals, campuses, and private security buy, and the partner integrations that put Citizen inside the tools they already run. You report to the Founder, who makes product calls alongside you and designs alongside our product designer. You will never hire a product manager. Your headcount is agents. The production work of product management, discovery synthesis, competitive reads, spec drafts, experiment design and analysis, forecast updates, launch notes, partner documentation, the weekly numbers, is done by an agent team you build and operate. One person with the right systems and the right judgment now carries what a product org of six or eight carried three years ago. That is the job, and this is the first moment it has been possible.
Why now
Citizen built the public safety category and became the #1 safety app in the country. The next chapter is a product people open every day rather than only on a bad one, a subscription business that funds it, an enterprise business that is already working and now needs to scale, and Citizen in every country in the world. The levers are known. What has been missing is one person who holds the whole product in their head, sees where it has sprawled, and can make it sharp again while moving the numbers. Until recently that person needed a department. Now they need agents, taste, and the nerve to decide.
How We Work
Every role at Citizen is two things: the craft, and the operation of AI to multiply it. You are a product leader first. Judgment about what to build and what to kill. A feel for what people will open every day and what they will pay for. The ability to walk a hospital's security director through what ships and when, and to tell a founder with strong opinions that the data says otherwise. You will work alongside colleagues who are not people. Eve is our engineering agent; she lives in the codebase and ships. Athena is the Founder's chief of staff; she runs operations and will be in your inbox on day one. You will build your own. If you are still writing specs from a blank page or assembling the weekly read by hand in month three, something has gone wrong. What this job is not: a roadmap of other people's requests, quarterly planning theater, a PM team to build, or a layer between the Founder and the product. The agents produce the artifacts. You produce the decisions.
What You Will Own
The product architecture. Citizen does a lot: live video, incidents, alerts, Protect, Premium, enterprise consoles, an API. It grew by accretion. You own making it one product again: fewer concepts, clearer paths, a system that agents can build from and users do not have to think about. This is the first thing you do and the reason everything after it ships faster. The core product. Signups, activation, the map, the incident experience, live video, alerts, and the loops that turn a download into a daily habit. Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 retention and weekly active use are yours, jointly with Design. The subscription business. Pricing and packaging, plan mix, trials, the upgrade path, and the checkout. Every dollar of consumer revenue has a product decision behind it. Our product designer owns the paying member's experience and ships the tests; you own the roadmap and the plan they ladder to. Enterprise, API, and partners. The product side of selling real-time intelligence to cities, hospitals, campuses, and private security: what ships, how a customer gets from signed to live, how the API is packaged and priced, and the partner integrations that put Citizen inside the tools they already run. Sales and the COO own the relationships and the contracts; you own the product, and you own its velocity: enterprise customers renew and expand on what ships, and that number is yours. Metrics and forecasting. The product drivers underneath the revenue plan: conversion, plan mix, retention, enterprise expansion. The CFO owns the forecast and the P&L; you own the inputs, you defend them, and you explain the variance before anyone asks. Experimentation. The test program end to end across every surface: hypothesis, guardrails, read, ship decision. You hold the bar on rigor. A result nobody trusts is worse than no result. The agent team. The PM work above, run through agents you build and operate. This is not a separate workstream. It is how one person carries the whole surface, and it is the part of the job that compounds. You will also show the rest of the company what product looks like when it is done this way. Partnership. Daily with the Founder and CEO on direction. With the product designer on what the user sees. With engineering leadership on what ships and when. With Finance on the model, with Sales on enterprise, with Real-Time Operations on what the people running the city actually need, and with the agents that already work here.
Your First 90 Days
- Days 1–30. Use the product every day in New York. Pay for it. Learn the funnel, the subscription data, the experiment history, the enterprise pipeline, and the codebase enough to be dangerous. Sit on the Mission Control floor. Take over the weekly revenue read and the forecast by the end of the month.
- Days 31–60. Bring the Founder the product architecture: what Citizen is, what it is not, and what gets cut, merged, or rebuilt. Set the product agenda with him: the three bets across consumer, subscription, and enterprise, the test roadmap, the forecast. Ship your first pricing or paywall decision. Stand up the first agent-run loops end to end, in experiment analysis and in spec drafting.
- Days 61–90. Present the twelve-month product plan with the numbers behind it. Have at least one test result that changed the plan, and one agent-run loop that a human no longer touches.
How Success is Measured
- Core product: Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 retention and weekly active use, against a plan you own
- Consumer revenue: paid conversion, plan mix, ARPU, and subscriber retention, against a plan you own
- Enterprise: integrations live, time from signed to onboarded, customers served per person on the team
- Forecast accuracy: actuals against your forecast, monthly, improving
- Experimentation: tests shipped per month, share with a clean read, share that changed a decision
- Share of product production work carried by agents you operate, with rigor held or raised
Who You Are
Each of these are a system you design and operate, not a department you run.
The product architecture. Citizen does a lot: live video, incidents, alerts, Protect, Premium, enterprise consoles, an API. It grew by accretion. You make it one product again: fewer concepts, clearer paths, a system that agents can build from and users do not have to think about. It is the first thing you do and the reason everything after it ships faster. The specs come out of the codebase and the data, drafted by agents you direct, and the prototypes are on a phone in hours, not in a deck in weeks. The listening loop. Every incident on the Mission Control floor, every live video, every App Store review, every support ticket, every enterprise call: read daily, by agents, and turned into a standing proposal for what the product should do next. You decide what gets built. The proposal never waits for a research sprint. The core product and its habit. Signups, activation, the map, the incident experience, live video, alerts, and the loops that turn a download into a daily habit. Day-1, Day-7, and Day-30 retention and weekly active use are yours, jointly with Design. The experiment engine. Agents propose tests, configure them, and read them. You set the guardrails, hold the bar on rigor, and make the ship decision. Across every surface, consumer and enterprise. A result nobody trusts is worse than no result. The subscription business. Pricing and packaging, plan mix, trials, the upgrade path, and the checkout. Every dollar of consumer revenue has a product decision behind it. Our product designer owns the paying member's experience and ships the tests; you own the roadmap and the plan they ladder to. Enterprise, API, and partners. The product side of selling real-time intelligence to cities, hospitals, campuses, and private security: what ships, how a customer gets from signed to live, how the API is packaged and priced, and the integrations that put Citizen inside the systems cities already run. Sales and the COO own the relationships and the contracts; you own the product and its velocity. Enterprise customers renew and expand on what ships, and that number is yours. A forecast that updates itself. The product drivers underneath the revenue plan: conversion, plan mix, retention, enterprise expansion. The CFO owns the forecast and the P&L; you own the inputs, and you build the loop that refreshes them and explains the variance before anyone asks. The agentic product itself. Where an agent should listen, verify, write, or route, and where a human must. Which decisions a city's safety can hand to a machine and which it never should. This is product design for a system that acts in the real world in real time, and you own the standard. Partnership. Daily with the Founder on direction. With the product designer on what the user sees. With engineering leadership on what ships and when. With Finance on the model, with Sales on enterprise, with Real-Time Operations on what the people running the city actually need, and with the agents that already work here.
The First Conversation Bring three things. One number you moved across a whole product, and exactly how. One product you made coherent, and what you cut to get there. And the agent team you run today: what it does without you, what it does not, and what you would build next. Walk us through them; concise is better. We are listening for judgment, for rigor, and for how you work.
Compensation
Base salary of $265,000–$310,000 per year, plus meaningful equity
Why work at Citizen
- Culture & Values: Mission-driven environment where "Mission > Team > Individual." Values include acting like an owner, breaking down walls, and thinking big but starting small.
- Team: Composed of alumni from top tech companies (Instagram, Square, Uber, Google), volunteer EMTs, and violence interrupters, creating a diverse mix of tech expertise and real-world safety experience.
- Work Model: Hybrid workspace (flexible split between remote and on-site in New York City).
- Notable Perks:
- Fully covered premium for medical, dental, and vision insurance
- Equity stock options for all full-time employees
- Unlimited PTO (for full-time employees) and 14 weeks of fully paid parental leave
- Monthly tech stipend, commuter benefits, and in-office lunches (Tue-Thurs)
- Learning and development budget, One Medical membership