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://www.smcgov.org/dem.
Bottom Line Up Front
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.
About The Role
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.
Examples Of Duties
What This Role Actually Involves
Partnership and Coordination Across the Operational Area
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.
Alert Crafting and Operational Readiness
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.
Communications and One County, One Voice
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.
Building Programs and Finishing Them
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.
On Call Duty and Disaster Response
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.
Who We Are Looking For
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.
