Job description

A NOTE FROM THE FOUNDER I design. I always have. For years I did it with a small team and a lot of late nights, and it got Citizen to millions of people. Now I do it with agents, and the gap between an idea and a working build on my phone is measured in hours. I need one designer who works that way with me: someone with real taste who would rather ship the prototype than polish the deck, and who is willing to own what people pay for, not just what they see. You will get direct feedback from me, and I want it back. You will also see your work in front of millions of people faster than anywhere else you have been. THE ROLE 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. We are rebuilding Citizen as an AI-native company. Engineering and operations already run with AI agents working alongside humans. Product design is next, and you will define what that looks like. You will be the senior product designer for Citizen's consumer mobile experience and the product owner of its revenue surface, reporting directly to the Founder and CEO, who designs alongside you. There is no product manager between you and the subscription business. Four outcomes are yours: a product people open every day rather than only on a bad one, interfaces that make real-time video and live safety feel effortless on a phone, a subscription experience that converts and keeps people, and a design operation where agents do the production work while you do the thinking. You inherit a product used by millions, a brand people recognize, a founder who cares about pixels, and the mandate to build the category's next chapter rather than polish its last one. You set the bar with your own work first. The design team is small today, and as it grows you will help shape how it works and who it needs. WHY NOW Citizen built the public safety category and became the #1 safety app in the country. The next chapter is not a redesign of that product. It is a different kind of product: live, AI-native, ambient, and personal, built on the base and the distribution the first chapter earned. The person in this seat decides what safety looks like on a phone when an agent is watching the city for you. Almost nobody gets to invent a category twice from a real base with real distribution. You will. WHAT "APPLIED AI" MEANS HERE You are a product designer first. The craft is the job: judgment, taste, the ability to look at forty variants and know which one is right and why. Anyone can generate options now. Almost nobody can choose. You are also the person who builds and runs the agents that do the production work. Variants by the dozen before lunch, assets at every size and locale without a human exporting them, a Figma frame turned into a working prototype the same afternoon. You decide what runs without a person, you raise the bar on the output, and you show the rest of the company what a designer with a team of agents can ship. If you are still exporting assets by hand in month three, something has gone wrong. The scope is yours. The CEO is your only approval. You do not open a ticket; if the tool does not exist, you build it. WHAT YOU WILL OWN - The consumer mobile experience. iOS first, Android close behind. Onboarding, the map, the incident experience, live video, alerts, Premium. Every screen a user touches, and the system that holds them together. The tempo is a prototype on a device the same day, not a review the following week. - Category-defining work. Live, AI-generated, and ambient experiences that do not exist yet: what a notification becomes when it can show you the scene, what a safety app is when it talks back, what the interface is when the phone is in a pocket and the user is walking home. You are expected to bring ideas the CEO has not had. - The revenue product. Paywalls, plan mix, trials and reverse trials, the upgrade path, payment at onboarding, and everything a paying member sees. Not just the screens: the roadmap, the experiments, and the ship decisions. Agents you run set up the tests and draft the reads; Growth analytics holds the numbers; you decide what goes live. Every dollar of consumer revenue has a product decision behind it, and those decisions are yours. - The design system. Citizen's visual language across product, brand, and the live broadcast studio: type, color, motion, sound, iconography. Cinematic, restrained, real. You own it, you evolve it, and you build it so agents can produce from it reliably without asking. - Prototyping and validation. High-fidelity prototypes in days, not weeks. Figma, Origami, SwiftUI, code, whatever gets the idea onto a device fastest. Usability sessions, funnel data, and live experiments to find out whether it worked, with the analysis arriving before the meeting rather than being the meeting. - The machine. The workflows above, designed, run, and pushed forward. You decide where the human stays in the loop. This is how all of the above gets done, not a separate workstream, and it is the part of the job that compounds. - Partnership. Daily with the Founder and CEO on direction. Tightly with iOS and Android engineering on what ships and when. With Marketing on launches, 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. Learn the data, the users, the operations floor, and the codebase enough to be dangerous. Audit every flow. Ship one visible improvement to production. - Days 31–60. Set the product design agenda with the CEO: the three bets, the system, the operation. Take over the live revenue tests and run the next one end to end. Stand up the first production loops in asset generation and prototyping. - Days 61–90. Ship the first category-defining experience to real users. Set the twelve-month design roadmap and what it takes to run it. WHO YOU ARE - You have spent roughly a decade designing consumer mobile products that millions of people use, end to end, and shipping them. You have taste, and you can show the work that proves it. - You have discernment. Given a hundred generated options, you know which three are worth a human's attention and can say why in a sentence. This is the skill that matters most here. - You have made something that did not exist before. A new interaction, a new category, a product people described as "the first one that felt like the future." You want to do it again. - High agency. Handed a direction, you come back with a better one. You decide, you ship, and you build the tool when it does not exist. - You build with AI already. You have opinions about what the tools can and cannot do, you have replaced parts of your own workflow with agents, and you are paying attention to what is next. - You think in systems: type, color, motion, sound, and how a design language survives contact with a team and a fleet of agents. - You have owned an outcome, not only a surface. You have run a paywall, pricing, or onboarding test end to end, read the result honestly, and shipped or killed it on the number. You are comfortable being the product manager when there is not one. - You are fluent in video and motion. Citizen is a live video product; still frames are not enough. You prototype in high fidelity, fast, on a real device. You are comfortable enough with code to get an idea onto a phone without waiting for an engineer. You are not an engineer, and we are not looking for one. You lead by example first, and you want to help a small team do its best work. - You care about the mission. Safety is a real thing that happens to real people on their worst day, and you design like it matters. - You make confident decisions without a complete picture, take direct feedback from a founder with strong opinions, and give it back. THE FIRST CONVERSATION Bring two things. One thing you made that did not exist before, and one part of your own workflow you replaced with agents. Walk us through both; concise is better. We are listening for taste, for systems, and for whether you think about the business as your own. COMPENSATION Base salary of $155,000–$215,000 per year, plus meaningful equity. Compensation here is deliberately above market. The new normal is one person, working with agents, carrying what a design team used to carry. That person is rare, and we pay for the person, not the band. Meet the bar and we will comp you accordingly, in salary and in equity. We would rather one person own a real piece of Citizen than eight own a slice each. Full numbers in the first conversation.

Requirements

Must-haves

We are rebuilding Citizen as an AI-native company. Engineering and operations already run with AI agents working alongside humans. Product design is next, and you will define what that looks like.
You set the bar with your own work first. The design team is small today, and as it grows you will help shape how it works and who it needs.
You are a product designer first. The craft is the job: judgment, taste, the ability to look at forty variants and know which one is right and why. Anyone can generate options now. Almost nobody can choose.
The scope is yours. The CEO is your only approval. You do not open a ticket; if the tool does not exist, you build it.
Days 1–30. Use the product every day in New York. Learn the data, the users, the operations floor, and the codebase enough to be dangerous. Audit every flow. Ship one visible improvement to production.
Days 61–90. Ship the first category-defining experience to real users. Set the twelve-month design roadmap and what it takes to run it.
You have spent roughly a decade designing consumer mobile products that millions of people use, end to end, and shipping them. You have taste, and you can show the work that proves it.
You have discernment. Given a hundred generated options, you know which three are worth a human's attention and can say why in a sentence. This is the skill that matters most here.
You have made something that did not exist before. A new interaction, a new category, a product people described as "the first one that felt like the future." You want to do it again.
High agency. Handed a direction, you come back with a better one. You decide, you ship, and you build the tool when it does not exist.
You build with AI already. You have opinions about what the tools can and cannot do, you have replaced parts of your own workflow with agents, and you are paying attention to what is next.
You think in systems: type, color, motion, sound, and how a design language survives contact with a team and a fleet of agents.
You care about the mission. Safety is a real thing that happens to real people on their worst day, and you design like it matters.
You make confident decisions without a complete picture, take direct feedback from a founder with strong opinions, and give it back.

Nice-to-haves

None flagged.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

aifigmarestdesign system

Platform: ashby
Effort: quick