Posting number: POSTING ONLY (B321D)
Department: Department of Emergency Management
Job classification: Department of Emergency Management Coordinator - Unclassified
Posting type: Open & Promotional
Categories: Administration, Law Enforcement, Fire & EMS, Training, Criminology
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SMC EM is not a typical emergency management shop. We operate more like a startup inside the public sector, building new programs, forging cross sector partnerships, and rethinking what modern emergency management looks like for a county of 775,000 residents across 20 cities and 18 unincorporated communities.
Our mission is to advance community resilience through a proactive and comprehensive approach to emergency management, involving the whole community in every phase of preparedness, mitigation, response, and recovery.
To learn more, visit https://www.smcgov.org/dem.
Alert and warning is the focus area for this role. Emergency management is the job.
Whoever we hire will spend a large share of their time alerting and on the countywide communications work that surrounds it. That same person will also sit on a rotational on call roster, write and maintain plans, design and run exercises, deliver training, staff the Emergency Operations Center, and deploy when San Mateo County is in a disaster. Those duties are not the fine print at the bottom of this posting. They are the conditions of employment, they apply to every coordinator in this department regardless of specialty, and they will pull you away from your program work without warning.
If you want a role that stays inside one system and one lane, this is not it. If you want to be part of a small department that responds together and builds in the time between, keep reading.
For more than a year, the Department of Emergency Management has been deliberately building a countywide alert and warning program that brings coherence, consistency, and credibility to how SMC EM communicates with the public before, during, and after emergencies. We have delivered intensive training across the operational area, socialized the social science that drives excellence in warning language and protective action, and built trust with partners in every city. We now need someone to scale that work and keep finding ways to improve it.
This is an internal and external facing role. Thirty-two agencies within the San Mateo County Operational Area hold alerting authority and sending rights. Each has its own protocols, staffing models, and level of experience. Your job is to be the connective tissue, building strategic social capital, socializing our approach with partners, supporting alignment across jurisdictions and making sure that when an alert goes out in this county it is timely, accurate, actionable, and drives protective action.
You will be informing, influencing, and advising, so comfort with communications and relationship building across very different disciplines matters as much as technical fluency. At times you will stand next to Incident Commanders during fast-moving events and help translate urgency into direction with the clarity and completeness that saves lives. You will train and sustain the readiness of users on alerting platforms, and you will say something when quality slips or when there is a better way. And you will do all of this while representing a department that is changing the culture of emergency management in one of the most complex operational areas in the state.
Alert and warning is also the sharpest edge of a much broader communications practice, and this role carries a real share of that practice along with several bodies of work you will own from concept through completion.
You are the primary point of contact for the 32 agencies that hold alerting authority here, and the person responsible for moving them toward consistent practice. That means recurring touchpoints to advance shared goals, surface gaps, and work through problems together. It means briefing alert and warning standards to city councils and the Board of Supervisors, to law and fire chiefs, to emergency managers, and to community organizations, adapting the message every time without changing the substance. It means representing San Mateo at advisory committees, work groups, tabling events, and public facing engagements at every level of government. And it means running training seminars and hands-on workshops for authorized users across jurisdictions on platforms, protocols, and message crafting.
You will develop, review, and issue emergency alerts that drive protective action. Clear, accurate, geographically targeted, accessible across languages, and calibrated to the threat. This work asks you to understand what makes an alert effective, not simply how to press send.
You will maintain fluency across IPAWS, Wireless Emergency Alerts, the Emergency Alert System, mass notification platforms, and reverse 9-1-1. You will run regular testing and evaluation of alert and warning systems for functionality, reliability, and interoperability across jurisdictions, and you will take part in after action reviews that turn lessons into changed protocols.
SMC EM runs One County, One Voice, the countywide crisis communications framework built so that when something happens here the public hears one clear account from a government that sounds coordinated rather than fragmented. This role sits inside that work and carries a meaningful share of it.
You will help design and run the Compass Forums, the recurring practitioner series that convenes the county's sending rights holders and communicators for structured practice throughout the year. That covers shaping session content with faculty, preparing participant materials, running the room, and following through on what each cohort commits to.
You will write a great deal. Recurring written guidance for sending rights holders, message templates, briefing memos, talking points, web copy, social content, and public education material for campaigns such as SMC Alert sign up. Some of it will carry your name. Much of it will go out under someone else's, and you must be comfortable with that.
During activations you will support the county's public information function, helping move accurate information to the public and to partner agencies at the speed the incident demands. Outside of activations you will help the department say what it means in plain language, whether the audience is a resident, a chief, or an elected official.
Several bodies of work will belong to you outright, from the first blank page to the day they are done. You will take a rough directive, turn it into a defined scope with a sequence and a date, pull in the people whose sign off you need, hold the schedule when other priorities pull at it, and close it out with something real to show for it. Then you will do it again, usually with three or four running at once and at different stages.
The kind of work that lands here include standing up a countywide alerting standard from scratch, rebuilding public facing evacuation and preparedness materials, taking a notification platform through evaluation and rollout, advancing the county's alert and warning plan through review and adoption, and producing an improvement plan that changes practice rather than sitting on a shelf. You will also manage vendor services and contracts tied to alerting platforms.
This is the part of the job most candidates overestimate about themselves. We will ask you to walk us through something you started and finished end to end, including what slipped and how you recovered it.
SMC EM staff share a rotational on call roster and every coordinator takes a turn, typically a week at a time, maintaining 24-hour readiness and responding to the field or to the Emergency Operations Center as conditions require. That rotation covers all hazards, not only alert and warning. The call that wakes you at two in the morning may be about a levee, a public safety power shutoff, a hazardous materials release, or a structure fire, and you are expected to be competent and composed with any of them.
When the county activates, you take the assignment the incident needs rather than the one your title suggests. That might be an alerting role, a seat in a Joint Information Center, a position in an EOC section, or a field deployment alongside a partner agency. Activations run through nights, weekends, and holidays, and they can last for days or months like during COVID.
Between events you carry your share of the readiness work that makes response possible. Writing and maintaining plans and annexes, designing and delivering exercises from tabletop through functional, training county staff and operational area partners, and taking part in after action reviews and improvement planning. This work is not adjacent to the alert and warning program. It is what keeps the alert and warning program connected to how the county responds.
Please give this section real weight before you apply. The on-call obligation and the disaster response expectation are the parts of this role that most often surprise candidates arriving from a communications or program background, and they are not negotiable.
The right person is not simply technically proficient with alerting systems. They understand the weight of what an alert means and the responsibility that comes with it. They know that a poorly crafted message can erode public trust, cause unnecessary panic, or fail to prompt the protective action that saves lives. We are looking for operational skills paired with the judgment, presence, and relational ability to be credible across a complex operational area.
You are insatiably curious, always learning, and never satisfied with the way it has always been done. You ask for help when you are uncertain and you verify before you act, because in this work getting it right matters more than getting it fast.
You can operate when the situation is messy, the information is incomplete, and the stakes are high. Emergency management rarely hands you a clean playbook, and you can pivot, adapt, and make sound decisions while the picture is still forming.
You can write from a blank page. Not fill in a template someone else built but sit down with a hard idea and produce something clear, correct, and ready for an audience that includes elected officials and the public.
You self-direct. You see what the day requires before anyone assigns it, you anticipate what your director and your partners will need next, and you adjust as conditions shift rather than waiting for direction. Proven ability to take initiatives from concept through delivery while managing multiple projects concurrently.
You hold your position under pressure. If you believe an alert is inaccurate or could cause harm, you say so out loud, including to people senior to you, and you can defend the reasoning without becoming defensive.
Any combination of education and experience that would likely provide the required knowledge, skills and abilities is qualifying. A typical way to qualify is:
Education: Bachelor's degree from an accredited college or university in business, public administration, emergency management or related discipline.
Experience: One year of experience having responsibility for assisting in program planning, development and budgeting in the public, military, or private organization, preferably related to emergency/disaster planning and management.
If you are interested in being considered for this position, please submit a resume and a cover letter that responds to the supplemental questions below, up to three pages.
Please include "SMC EM Coordinator, Alert and Warning, Unclassified" in the subject line of your email submission.
NOTE: Application materials are accepted by email only. Application materials will be reviewed as received and qualified candidates will be contacted for an interview. Apply immediately. This posting is open on a continuous basis, and a selection may be made at any time. Submittals that do not include all required elements will not be considered.
San Mateo County is centrally located between San Francisco, San Jose, and the East Bay. With over 750,000 residents, San Mateo is one of the largest and most diverse counties in California and serves a multitude of culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse communities.
The County of San Mateo, as an employer, is committed to advancing equity to ensure that all employees are welcomed in a safe and inclusive environment. The County seeks to hire, support, and retain employees who reflect our diverse community. We encourage applicants with diverse backgrounds and lived experiences to apply. Eighty percent of employees surveyed stated that they would recommend the County as a great place to work.
The County of San Mateo is an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels.
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HR Analyst: Lealoa Numera (09112026) (B321 Department of Emergency Management Coordinator - Unclassified)
The County of San Mateo provides for the health and welfare of all people within its borders and serves as the local government for the unincorporated areas. Voters elect a five-member Board of Supervisors and six additional County officials: the Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder/Chief Elections Officer, District Attorney, Controller, Coroner, Sheriff and Treasurer-Tax Collector.
We invite you to explore our career opportunities at https://jobs.smcgov.org/
