Job Description

Company Description

Appointment Type

Temporary Provisional. This is not a permanent appointment. A provisional appointee must participate and be successful in a Civil Service examination for this classification and be selected through an open competitive process in order to be considered for permanent appointment. Provisional appointments may not exceed three (3) years.

Specific information regarding this recruitment process are listed below:

• Application Opening: Monday, November 9, 2026
• Application Deadline: Friday, November 13, 2026 at 11:59pm PST
• ✅ Required Supplemental Questionnaire due at the time of application: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/g/wcdNCKrRUR
• ✅ A resume is required at the time of application.

About the Office of the City Administrator:

The Office of the City Administrator includes 20+ agencies and over 1,000 dedicated staff who provide essential services to San Francisco residents and businesses and improve the administration of government.

Our Mission

The City Administrator’s Office is strongly committed to ensuring efficient and effective government services, increasing the City’s safety and resiliency, strengthening the local economy, supporting equity and inclusion, and optimizing the City’s capital planning and infrastructure.

Our Vision

We are committed to ensuring that the City's services are inclusive, efficient, equitable, and culturally competent for San Franciscans of all races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and sexual orientations. This commitment requires comprehensive review and thorough analysis of existing practices and policies to remove barriers to real inclusion.

We are also committed to ensuring that the Department is a safe, equitable, and inclusive workplace for individuals of all races. This includes creating opportunities for hiring, promotion, retention, training, and development, for all employees, including but not limited to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC).

To learn more about our departments, divisions, and programs, visit: https://sf.gov/departments/city-administrator

About the Office of Contract Administration

Procurement sits at the center of City operations.

In the City and County of San Francisco, procurement is a core strategic function that enables the delivery of quality services for our residents and visitors. The City annually spends over $6 billion through procurement, purchasing everything from chemicals to treat our drinking water, to security guards and custodians to maintain public buildings, to goat grazing services to reduce fire risk on public lands — and everything in between. Because procurement shapes the City’s ability to deliver essential services, it depends on creative, talented procurement professionals who can navigate complexity and turn diverse operational needs into high quality contracts that make a real impact.

The Office of Contract Administration (OCA) is the City’s central purchasing agency and is responsible for:

1. Procuring the commodities and services that support the operations of 50+ City departments and ultimately the services the City delivers to our community.
2. Overseeing and administering San Francisco Administrative Code Chapter 21, ensuring City departments abide by public contracting rules and regulations. Fairness, transparency, and equity are core values of our organization.
3. Setting procurement standards citywide, including the training, templates, reports and dashboards, and guidance departments need to do their work.

At OCA, we’re looking for folks who are motivated by solving complex but compelling operational challenges, dedicated to ensuring that public procurement functions ethically and transparently, enjoy bringing order to ambiguity, thrive in project management, and see themselves as an emerging public procurement leader. In addition, to ensure new hires are successful at OCA, desirable qualifications include experience in public procurement and contracting and experience in research and writing.

Why work here

Purchasing staff at OCA sit at the center of how the City delivers its mission. This isn’t a supporting role that’s focused on routine procurement — it’s high caliber, high impact work — and as such, we offer several unique benefits:

• Under the IFPTE Local 21 MOU, Senior Purchasers who possess certain certifications (CPM, CPSM, CPPB, CPPO) receive 3% premium pay. This is in addition to the salary range listed above on this job announcement.
• The department supports a hybrid work schedule in compliance with City and County of San Francisco’s policy for remote work. 

Job Description

OCA seeks to hire several Senior Purchasers to perform procurement work of considerable complexity in support of several City departments. Senior Purchasers are assigned to one of OCA’s eight procurement teams, each of which is overseen by a Procurement Manager. Teams are currently organized by client department to allow for the development of subject-matter expertise and specialization.

Across all procurement teams, Senior Purchasers are expected to perform the following examples of important and essential duties:

• Partner with client departments to take procurement requests from idea to reality. This includes analyzing incoming procurement requests, determining the best procurement approach, conducting market research, drafting specifications and scopes of work, obtaining required approvals, working through risks and challenges, and ultimately delivering the product or service needed by the client department.
• Conduct public procurements to meet citywide and departmental needs, including drafting solicitation documents, conducting vendor outreach, managing public solicitation processes, analyzing vendor bids and proposals, recommending contract awards, and developing contract documents. When needed, modify and amend contracts to ensure continuity of support.
• May review departmental contracts to ensure contracts are fully compliant with solicitation requirements and City policies and Chapter 21 of the San Francisco Administrative Code. Where gaps exist, work with departments to address and correct issues.
• Support client departments and OCA Procurement Managers to manage vendor performance issues.
• Analyze data and research to inform individual procurements, identify patterns or issues for discussion, prepare reports, and audit compliance and performance.
• Advise client departments on City purchasing policies, rules, processes, and practices, and propose City policy and business practice changes to improve efficiency, clarity, and performance of contracting operations.
• May supervise and provide training on purchasing practices, processes, contract development, and systems that manage City procurement. May assist in the training of Purchasers.
• Perform other duties as assigned.

Qualifications

Education:

Baccalaureate degree from an accredited university or college

Experience:

Three (3) years of professional purchasing experience with responsibilities such as: identifying vendors and a ascertaining quotes, selecting a vendor based on a set of criteria, identifying and negotiating terms and conditions and procuring goods and services.

Substitution:

Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of two (2) years). Thirty (30) semester units/forty-five (45) quarter units equal one (1) year.

Note(s):

• One-year full-time employment is considered equivalent to 2000 hours (2000 hours of qualifying work experience is based on a 40 hour work week). Any overtime hours that you work above forty (40) hours per week are not included in the calculation to determine full-time employment.
• Applicants must meet minimum qualification requirements by the final filing date unless otherwise noted.
• Every application is reviewed to ensure that you meet the minimum qualifications as listed in the job ad. Please review our articles on Employment Application and Minimum Qualifications and Verification of Experience and/or Education for considerations taken when reviewing applications.

Desirable Qualifications: The stated desirable qualifications may be considered at the end of the selection process when candidates are referred for hiring:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ideally honed in a public procurement environment.
• Strong attention to detail and ability to track and manage many details and decision points simultaneously.
• Ability to work independently on complex tasks and projects.
• Ability to build strong relationships and work effectively with clients and stakeholders.
• Experience with procuring or contracting for large public sector entities with complex rules and regulations

Additional Information

Selection Procedures

The selection process will include evaluation of applications in relation to minimum requirements. Depending on the number of applicants, the Department may establish and implement additional screening mechanisms to comparatively evaluation qualifications of candidates. If this becomes necessary, only those applicants whose qualifications most closely meet the needs of the Department will be invited for an interview.

Applicants who meet the minimum qualifications are not guaranteed to advance through all of the steps in the selection process.

Verification

• Please make sure it is clear in your application exactly how you meet the minimum qualifications.
• Applicants may be required to submit verification of qualifying education and experience at any point in the application and/or departmental selection process.

Supplemental Questionnaire and Resume

After application submission, candidates deemed qualified must complete all subsequent steps to advance in this selection process, which includes completion of a supplemental questionnaire at the time of application. Please see this link to submit the supplemental questionnaire:

https://forms.cloud.microsoft/g/wcdNCKrRUR

A resume is required at the time of application.

Additional Information Regarding Employment with the City and County of San Francisco:

• Information About The Hiring Process
• Conviction History
• Employee Benefits Overview
• Equal Employment Opportunity
• Disaster Service Worker
• ADA Accommodation
• Veterans Preference
• Right to Work
• Copies of Application Documents
• Diversity Statement

Applicants will receive a confirmation email from notification@careers.sf.gov that their online application has been received in response to every announcement for which they file. Applicants should retain this confirmation email for their records. Failure to receive this email means that the online application was not submitted or received.

Applicants may be contacted by email about this recruitment and, therefore, it is their responsibility to ensure that their registered email address is accurate and kept up-to-date. Also, applicants must ensure that email from CCSF is not blocked on their computer by a spam filter. To prevent blocking, applicants should set up their email to accept CCSF mail from the following addresses (@sfgov.org, @sfdpw.org, @sfport.com, @flysfo.com, @sfwater.org, @sfdph.org, @asianart.org, @sfmta.com, @sfpl.org, @dcyf.org, @first5sf.org, @famsf.org, @ccsf.edu, @smartalerts.info, and @smartrecruiters.com).

HR Analyst Information: If you have any questions regarding this recruitment or application process, please contact the HR analyst at Connie.Poon@sfgov.org.

The City and County of San Francisco encourages women, minorities and persons with disabilities to apply. Applicants will be considered regardless of their sex, race, age, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition (associated with cancer, a history of cancer, or genetic characteristics), HIV/AIDS status, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, gender expression, military and veteran status, or other protected category under the law.