SMC EM Coordinator - and Warning; Unclassified

About the Department

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://(Use the "Apply for this Job" box below)..

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…