Mission Control Specialist

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, and the alert reaches phones in seconds. Nobody else on earth does that.

The work is rapidly evolving. AI agents now listen to the radio, draft the headline, and flag what matters. 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 newsroom, and a safety tool at once, and it is growing.

Mission Control is the human engine behind it: a small crew in Manhattan monitoring incidents across the country, verifying what is real, deciding what people read and who needs to know right now. Every day the crew's decisions reach millions of people.

The Role

You run a shift in Mission Control. Incidents arrive from first-responder radio, user video, partner feeds, and the AI agents that draft them. You verify, you decide the words and the audience, and you send. On a big day you are the person who takes a neighborhood story citywide at the right minute, with the right words, and no further than it deserves. On a quiet day you are the person who declines to.

This is a public safety job. It is also an editorial one. The best people in Mission Control think like a dispatcher and judge copy like an editor, and they are allergic to sending something wide because it would travel.

Why Now

Citizen built the public safety category by hand, at volume, and it worked. AI now carries more of the routine every month: the agents surface, draft, and queue; you decide and send. That makes each specialist's judgment worth more, not less, and it is why we are hiring for judgment rather than throughput. The person who joins now helps write the rules Mission Control and the AI agents will run on 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 will work alongside AI agents that transcribe scanner audio, draft titles and updates, propose audiences, and flag what needs a human eye. You direct that tooling, you decide what goes out, and you never let it upgrade a rumor into a fact. The AI makes you faster. The judgment is yours, and it is measured.

What You Will Own

• Your shift. Monitor live incident feeds, scanner audio, user video, and data streams across every market we cover. Confirm what is real, flag what is not, and keep the city spatially aware without feeding panic.

• The words. Review, correct, and send the incident titles, updates, and push notifications the AI drafts, to Citizen's editorial standard: lead with the live danger, say what is verified and what is not, prompt safe participation. Corrections when we are wrong, fast and plainly.

• The audience. Decide the reach of every send on relevance: nearby, citywide, out of area, national. Hold the line when a story is loud but not ours. Own the amplification decisions on your shift and be able to explain each one.

• Live coverage. Bring users on the scene live when it matters, coordinate with field creators and partner responders, and feed the studio when an incident goes on air.

• Mission Control's standards. Contribute to the weekly review of what we sent and why, and help write the rules Mission Control and the AI agents follow.

Your first 90 days

• Days 1 to 30. Shadow every shift pattern. Learn the feeds, the verification standard, the editorial voice, and the audience rules. Send with a senior specialist beside you.

• Days 31 to 60. Carry your own shifts. First weekly review with the Head of Real-Time Safety Operations: your sends, what landed, what you declined, against Mission Control's standard and your own prior weeks.

• Days 61 to 90. Own a regular slot, including a weekend day. Bring one rule to the weekly review from something you got wrong or right, and see it adopted.

How success is measured

• Verification accuracy: no unverified claim in a push or an update

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

• Audience discipline: wide sends that earned it, and the ones you declined

• Editorial standard held under pressure, as judged by the Head of Real-Time Safety Operations

You will always know how you are doing. We review the work weekly, with you, against Mission Control's own standard.

Who you are

• Sharp judgment under pressure. You stay calm when the situation is not, and you can tell the difference between urgent and merely loud.

• Fast, accurate, and detail-obsessed. You never upgrade a rumor into a fact, and you say "unconfirmed" without flinching.

• You can read a draft in five seconds and know whether it is true, clear, and safe to send. Most of the words will be drafted for you; the decision to send them never is.

• 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: in Mission Control 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: trust and safety or live moderation at scale, where you decided in seconds what millions of people would and would not see; 911 dispatch, EMS or fire communications, or a security operations center; a newsroom assignment desk, wire service, or breaking-news desk; military or public-safety communications. If you have made a call in under a minute that other people lived with, you already do half this job.

Nice to have: on-camera comfort for live coverage; Spanish; scanner fluency in a major market.

Compensation

Base salary of $70,000–$85,000 per year, plus equity.

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.