Mission Control Specialist, AI Operator

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 feeding panic.

The words. Shape, correct, and send the alerts and updates people see. Lead with the live danger, say what is verified and what is not, help people stay safe, and write it so they read it. Corrections when we are wrong, fast and plainly.

The audience. Decide the reach of every alert, from a single block to the whole country. Read the temperature of a city in real time and know what it needs to hear. Hold the line when a story is loud but not ours. Own the calls on your shift and be able to explain each one.

What lands. Learn what moves people to act and what makes them tune out, and get sharper every week.

Live coverage. Bring people on the scene live when it matters and work with the people on the ground to tell the story as it happens.

The playbook. Help review what we sent and why, and help write the standards Mission Control runs on.

Your first 90 days

Days 1 to 30. Learn the work end to end: the verification standard, the voice, and how we decide who needs to know. Send with a senior specialist beside you.

Days 31 to 60. Carry your own shifts. Review your work with your lead every week: what landed, what you declined, and how you are improving.

Days 61 to 90. Own a regular slot, including a weekend day. Bring one improvement, a rule or an AI workflow, built from something you got wrong or right, and see it adopted.

How Success is Measured

• Accuracy: nothing unverified goes out as fact

• Alerts that reach the people who need them, and not the people who do not

• Alerts people open and act on, never at the cost of accuracy

• Judgment on reach: wide sends that earned it, and the ones you declined

• Workflows you built that make the shift faster

You will always know how you are doing. We review the work weekly, with you.

Who You Are

You live online. You know the tone of the internet and the mood of a city, and you can tell in a second whether a line will land, fall flat, or land wrong.

AI is already how you work. You can walk us through a workflow you built or a tool you use every day, and what it does without you.

Fast with information and good with systems. You move between feeds, tools, and tabs without losing the thread. Scripting or code is a plus.

Sharp judgment under pressure. You stay calm when the situation is not, 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.