Senior Project Manager (1825) - Government Operations Recovery Initiative (GovOps), Office of City Administrator

Company Description

Permanent Exempt (PEX): Full Time position is excluded by the Charter from the competitive civil service examination process and shall serve at the discretion of the appointment officer. The anticipated duration of this project position is thirty-six (36) months and will not result in an eligible list or permanent civil service hiring. 

Specific information regarding this recruitment process are listed below: 

• Application Opening: Wednesday October 14, 2026

• Application Deadline: Wednesday, October 28, 2026 at 11:59pm PST 

• ✅ Required Supplemental Questionnaire due at the time of application: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/g/UCCnUJUVE0

• ✅ A resume and cover letter are 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 Government Operations Initiative: 

The Government Operations Initiative (GovOps) brings together teams across the City Administrator’s Office, Controller’s Office, and Department of Human Resources to tackle complex operational challenges that cut across traditional departmental boundaries. Launched in 2022 with an initial focus on supporting the City’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, GovOps focuses on improving the systems, policies, and processes that underpin City operations, with a focus on procurement and contracting, hiring, and financial operations. 

GovOps teams combine project management, policy and process expertise, data analysis, and change management to develop and implement complex reforms. Our work requires understanding how City processes operate today, identifying where they create unnecessary burden or barriers, and partnering across departments to design and implement practical improvements. 

The Procurement Reform Team 

The Senior Project Manager will join the GovOps Procurement Reform team within the City Administrator’s Office. Our team leads citywide efforts to make procurement and contracting simpler, faster, more effective, and more accessible for both the City staff who use these processes and the suppliers who do business with the City. 

Our portfolio spans policy and legislative reform, business process redesign, technology modernization, data and performance, and improvements to the supplier experience. We take on complex problems that often cross organizational and functional boundaries, working from initial problem definition and research through design, implementation, change management, and evaluation. 

While our core team is small, our work is highly collaborative. We partner closely with the Office of Contract Administration (OCA), Contract Monitoring Division (CMD), Department of Technology (DT), Controller’s Office (CON), and contracting professionals and operational teams across City departments. 

In our work, we strive to be dynamic and responsive to City staff and supplier needs, and we are guided by questions such as: 

• How can we make City processes simpler and more effective without losing the safeguards necessary for responsible stewardship of public resources? 

• How can we reduce barriers for small and local businesses, community-based organizations, and other suppliers seeking to do business with the City? 

• How do we design reforms that are ambitious enough to meaningfully improve government while also being practical, sustainable, and responsive to the people who will use them? 

This role is an opportunity for someone who is motivated by convoluted but compelling challenges in governance, enjoys bringing order to ambiguity, and is interested in finding the right balance between incremental and transformational change. We are looking for someone who is committed to ensuring that public institutions serve communities equitably and sees themselves as a public-sector leader. 

Job Description

The Senior Project Manager will lead the team’s technology, policy, systems, data, and performance portfolio, driving complex initiatives that improve how the City purchases goods and services and how suppliers do business with the City. The role will have a particular focus on leveraging emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, modernizing procurement systems, and strengthening the use of data and performance management to improve City operations. As one of two GovOps team leads, this position will lead high-priority, cross-departmental projects from strategy and design through implementation and continuous improvement. The Senior Project Manager will report to the Deputy Director of Operations and Procurement Reform in the Office of Contract Administration. 

Examples of Important and Essential Duties: 

• Procurement Process & Policy Reform: Lead initiatives to improve City procurement and contracting processes, including business process redesign, policy and legislative changes, and exploration of emerging technologies such as AI. Identify pain points and opportunities for improvement, develop solutions, and lead implementation of reforms that reduce administrative burden while appropriately managing risk. 

• Technology Procurement Reform: Lead initiatives to make the City’s technology purchasing processes faster, clearer, and more effective. Projects may include streamlined pathways for lower-risk technology purchases, improvements to City contract templates and purchasing programs, and reforms to cybersecurity review and procurement processes. 

• Procurement Systems & Digital Tools: Lead the design and implementation of citywide applications, tools, and technology that improve procurement operations and the supplier experience. Translate business needs into system requirements and coordinate with technical teams and end users to develop solutions such as tools for searching contract documents, managing supplier compliance documentation, and improving access to procurement information. 

• eProcurement Implementation: Lead OCA’s planning and implementation of a new eProcurement system, including procurement and contracting, business requirements, system configuration, testing, data and process readiness, user onboarding, change management, and risk and issue resolution. 

• Team Leadership & Supervision: Supervise and develop staff responsible for data, performance, and systems work, including setting priorities, assigning and reviewing work, providing coaching and feedback, and supporting staff development. Provide strategic direction for the team’s portfolio.  

• Cross-Functional Project Leadership: Build and manage strong working relationships across OCA and with key City partners, including CMD, the Department of Technology, CON Systems, and other departments. Establish project governance, workplans, communications, decision-making structures, and performance measures to keep complex, multi-stakeholder initiatives moving forward. 

Qualifications

Education:

Possession of a baccalaureate degree from an accredited college or university and:

Experience:

Seven (7) years of full-time equivalent experience performing professional level analytical work. Qualifying professional-level analytical work includes analysis, development, administration, and reporting in major programs and functions of an organization in the areas of budgets, contracts, grants, policy, or other functional areas related to the duties of positions in the 182X Class series.

Substitution: Possession of a graduate degree (Master's degree or higher) from an accredited college or university with major coursework in specialized subject matter areas such as public or business administration, management, business law, contract law, public policy, urban studies, economics, statistical analysis, finance, accounting or other fields of study closely related to the essential functions of positions in the Class series may be substituted for one (1) year of required experience.

Additional experience as described above may be substituted for the required degree on a year-for-year basis (up to a maximum of 2 years). Thirty (30) semester units or forty-five (45) quarter units equal one 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 used to identify job finalists at the end of the selection process when candidates are referred for hiring.

• Experience leading complex, cross-functional projects from strategy through implementation, including managing competing priorities, risks, stakeholders, and change. 

• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, with the ability to bring structure to ambiguous challenges and translate analysis into practical recommendations and solutions. 

• Experience using data to identify opportunities, measure performance, evaluate outcomes, and communicate findings and recommendations to decision-makers. 

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build strong relationships and work effectively across operational, policy, and technical teams. 

• Knowledge of public-sector operations, procurement, or contracting, combined with a creative, flexible, and collaborative approach to improving how government works. 

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  

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/UCCnUJUVE0

Resume and Cover Letter
A resume and cover letter are 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 exam 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.