About Citizen

Citizen is a free app that keeps you and your loved ones safe. It is a powerful force for good that has already evacuated people from burning buildings, diverted school buses from nearby terrorist attacks and reunited missing children with their parents.

Using our unique technology, 911 alerts are made available to the public and are accompanied by live stories, real-time updates, and user-generated content to provide you with the information you need to protect yourself and your loved ones. We act fast, break news, and give people the immediate information they need to stay safe. And we’re just getting started.

This year Citizen will expand further across the United States with the express mission of making your world a safer place. We’re looking for hardworking, mission-driven individuals to help take the Citizen app to the next level as we scale up nationwide. With a group of passionate builders from Facebook, Square, Uber, Google and HQ Trivia, Citizen is the company your current company doesn’t want you to know about.

Citizen is backed by Sequoia Capital, 8VC, Founders Fund, and Goodwater Capital and has raised tens of millions in VC funding.

Our Challenges

• Scaling: We have one of the fastest-growing organic user bases in NYC, and have expanded to multiple other cities. We are focused on the nationwide launch and the need to support that scale. A Citizen international launch will follow.
• Bursting: We designed our infrastructure to scale without notice in case of a spontaneous incident where we need to inform our entire user base. On significant events, we see over a million simultaneously connected clients and their associated live streams. The core systems need to be able to efficiently support these traffic patterns and continue to scale to millions of more users in the future.
• Machine learning: We process thousands of hours of audio every day looking for incidents that impact our users’ safety. To do this at scale, we’ve built ML models for audio analysis and targeting using the current state of the art from academia.
• Analytics: We want to alert users to the incidents that matter to them, in a way that scales across different geographic densities and demographics.
• Mobile video streaming: Our app will ingest high-quality video at low-latency, transcode, and redistribute the video to external media outlets seamlessly.
• Radio hardware: We build our own software-defined radio-based devices to consume all radio dispatch in every major city, whether analog or digital.

Our Stack - languages and technologies we use and teach

• Mobile: Swift (iOS), Kotlin (Android)
• Web: React.js, TypeScript
• Services: Go for transactional systems; Python for analytical systems
• Datastores: Cassandra, MySQL, Redis, Google PubSub
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes on Google Cloud

Role Description

As Citizen’s first security engineer, you will be responsible for setting best practices and standards around all things related to security within our organization. You will help us ensure that our software and systems are designed and implemented to the highest security standards. Additionally, you will perform technical security assessments, code reviews, and vulnerability testing to highlight risk, helping Citizen teams and partners to improve security. 

A successful candidate for this role will have a deep understanding of both information security and computer science. You should demonstrate strong communication skills, autonomy, and the ability to work with a variety of stakeholders. 

Responsibilities

• Perform technical security assessments, code audits, and design reviews.
• Develop technical solutions to help mitigate security vulnerabilities.
• Advise the broader team on security and advocate secure practices throughout the organization.
• Conduct research to identify new attack vectors against Citizen’s products and services.
• Take the lead on offensive security exercises.
• Implement software protection technologies including obfuscation, tamper detection, and whitebox cryptography.
• Recognize and safely utilize attacker tools, tactics and procedures.
• Monitor for and remediate security weaknesses and baseline regressions across cloud infrastructure.
• Prototype new ideas and test new open-source security tools.

Minimum qualifications:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field
• 5+ years of software development experience, ideally on a consumer-facing product
• 2+ years of experience in application-level vulnerability testing and code-level security auditing
• Significant experience with at least one of the following languages: Golang, Python, etc.
• Strong understanding of cloud services and architectures
• Self-starter comfortable with ambiguous situations
• Solid communication and collaboration skills
• Knowledge of at least two of the following: operating system internals and hardening, web application security, identity, and authentication controls, implementation of cryptographic protocols
• Passion and interest for cybersecurity and defending organizations against adversaries

Preferred Qualifications

• Prior experience working in a fast-paced high-growth startup environment
• Prior experience with advanced cryptographic algorithms (number theory, encryption codecs, hashes and fingerprinting, cloaking)
• True excitement about helping to lead the frontier in cybersecurity
• Worked with law enforcement organizations
• Familiarity with Zero Trust / BeyondCorp principles
• Participated in or supported incident response events
• Created and implemented optimization/automation initiatives to streamline security workflows

Citizen offers a competitive benefits package including medical, dental, vision, flexible spending accounts, unlimited PTO, company holidays, stock options, commuter benefits, lunch daily, weekly team dinners, regular team outings, guest speakers, and lots more! 

Citizen is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all.