The San Francisco Digital Services Team is transforming how residents interact with the City, by building services designed around the people that use them. Our mission is to make it easy for San Franciscans to get things done with the City online. We’re committed to equity, inclusion, honesty, and involving our residents in everything we do.

Formed in 2017, we are a team of 30, reporting to the City Administrator. We work in partnership with departments to make their services digital, and create standards and guidance for good services that serve our residents.

Digital Services is a team of product managers, designers, developers, researchers, service designers, and content strategists. As a member of this team, you would be part of a new and growing movement, with an opportunity to shape the City’s approach to technology.

Our Values

We are committed to equity in our hiring, team culture, and product outcomes and to fostering an inclusive work environment. We are building a team that reflects a diverse set of lived experiences and identities. This effort includes considering qualified candidates across a spectrum of races, colors, religions, genders, gender identities, sexual orientations, national origins, genetics, disabilities, ages, or veteran status.  If you’re looking for a team where you can make an impact and improve the lives of all San Francisco residents, then we want to hear from you.

The Housing Team

As a member of the Digital Services Housing Team you will work with the part of the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) that administers a variety of below market housing programs, both for rental and ownership units. 

The DAHLIA Affordable Housing project allows residents to learn about and apply for affordable housing opportunities in one place. Before the debut of DAHLIA, San Franciscans needed to monitor multiple sources of information for listings and had to fill out a lengthy and varied paper application for each new housing opportunity. This product launched in 2015 and won the 2018 Good Government Award.

DAHLIA has also freed MOHCD staff from a lot of the manual work previously required to input applications, run the housing lottery, and get applicants into housing units.

We think a lot about equity, accessibility, and helping MOHCD succeed in meeting their ever-changing program needs while also getting the data they need. We conduct user testing to make sure we’re building things that are important to and really work for residents. There are many other services MOHCD provides that we haven’t yet started working on, and we are looking forward to building these in the coming years.

Appointment Type: Permanent Exempt (PEX), this position is excluded by the Charter from the competitive Civil Service examination process and shall serve at the discretion of the Appointing Officer.

We are seeking an outstanding, experienced, front-end oriented senior software engineer to help modernize and expand the affordable housing application service at housing.sfgov.org, as well as build new services to help people get affordable housing. Candidates must have strong skills in front-end web development and experience with backend development. They must also be ready to quickly get to work within a multidisciplinary team.

Day-to-day you will be responsible for designing, creating, and improving new and existing services, platforms, and transactions within the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development. You will work with multiple departments to lead a comprehensive overhaul of the City’s web development practices, transforming the City’s approach to digital services. With support from the Digital Services Team, you will also help create new standards, and guidelines.

Responsibilities

Build web and mobile products to serve the public's needs

• Improve and maintain the current affordable housing application service written in Ruby on Rails, AngularJS, and ReactJS.
• Maintain a production system, including occasional support outside of business hours.
• Participate in reimplementing and improving the frontend in ReactJS.
• Take pride of ownership in all projects you touch and leave code better than you found it. Contribute to documentation, tests, style fixes, accessibility, performance, security, etc.
• Work effectively alongside other disciplines such as product management, design, design research, and content strategy to determine and reach product goals
• Participate in prototyping, feature prioritization, scrum meetings, code review, and architecture discussions.
• Deliver well-tested projects that are easy to deploy, update, and monitor by ensuring the tooling for this is present early in the project development cycle.
• Build web applications that are mobile-first and accessible from the start.

Transform the City’s approach to building and operating digital services

• Participate in working groups focused on shaping engineering policy and practices such as front end development, documentation, and testing. Help build buy-in on new internal digital standards, especially those related to web development.
• Participate in or lead (as necessary) an open dialogue with representatives from our partner agencies in implementing modern development standards, including transparency, user-centered design, and agile methodologies; understand and communicate the "why" of these standards, not just the "what."
• Help lead decisions about our development and deployment environments. Help build up a useful, robust automated test suite to support a Continuous Deployment environment.
• Share knowledge of tools and techniques with the wider team, both developers and non-developers. Use past experience and knowledge to mentor (and learn from) your peers throughout the City around software engineering best practices.
• Work with other members of the team to identify and solve complex technical, cultural, and organizational issues.
• Be involved in the wider web development community, identifying good practices we can adopt and sharing our experiences. Keep up on the latest trends and best practices in web development.
• Take pride in your team: Push yourself and others to constantly be improving in technical ability, process, and knowledge. Contribute to and maintain a positive culture based on mutual communication, constructive criticism, and knowledge sharing. Work toward creating (and always improving) a culture of openness, transparency, and mutual assistance within the Digital Services Team and the City as a whole.

1.  An associates degree in computer science, information systems, or a closely related field or its equivalent in terms of total course credits; AND

2.  Three (3) years of professional experience in web or software application development.

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). One (1) year is equivalent to thirty (30) semester units/ forty-five (45) quarter units with a minimum of 10 semester / 15 quarter units.

Desirable Qualifications

• Experience with Javascript, HTML/CSS and at least one front end framework (e.g. React, Angular, etc).
• Experience building server-side applications using frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django, and experience creating or extending REST APIs.
• Commitment to modern software development practices such as source control, continuous integration/continuous deployment, automated testing, and agile development
• Demonstrated experience writing clear, well-tested code using unit and end-to-end testing frameworks.
• Excellent leadership, communication, project management, and organizational skills.
• Exceptional verbal communication skills with the ability to effectively influence and communicate cross-functionally. An ability to communicate technical concepts to a non-technical audience.
• Experience presenting work at user groups and conferences
• Experience working on technical projects within a team, and favor collaboration over isolation. Experience mentoring colleagues (and enthusiasm for it!).
• Commitment to building services for all San Franciscans, including familiarity with usability, accessibility, and internationalization.
• A personal interest in public service or civic technology

Important: Your application must include a cover letter that explains why you are applying for this job, and how your experience makes you a good fit for this role. To upload these items, please attach using the "additional attachments" function.

Guidance for Applying:  Applicants must include all relevant job experience in the online application.

Verification: Applicants may be required to submit verification of qualifying education and experience at any point in the application and/or departmental selection process. Written verification (proof) of qualifying experience must verify that the applicant meets the minimum qualifications stated on the announcement. Written verification must be submitted on employer’s official letterhead, specifying name of employee, dates of employment, types of employment (part-time/full-time), job title(s), description of duties performed, and the verification must be signed by the employer. City employees will receive credit for the duties of the class to which they are appointed. Credit for experience obtained outside of the employee’s class will be allowed only if recorded in accordance with the provisions of the Civil Service Commission Rules. Experience claimed in self-employment must be supported by documents verifying income, earnings, business license and experience comparable to the minimum qualifications of the position. Copies of income tax papers or other documents listing occupations and total earnings must be submitted. If education verification is required, information on how to verify education requirements, including verifying foreign education credits or degree equivalency, can be found at http://sfdhr.org/index.aspx?page=456.

Note: Falsifying one’s education, training, or work experience or attempted deception on the application may result in disqualification for this and future job opportunities 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

AMENDED Application Opening: July 18, 2023 

Applicants are encouraged to apply immediately as this recruitment may close at any time, but not before August 4, 2023.

This announcement has been amended to extend the filing period for an additional recruitment period.

Compensation: $68.7625- $86.5125(hourly) / $143,026 - $179,946 (annually)

Late or incomplete submissions will not be considered. Mailed, hand delivered or faxed documents/applications will not be accepted.

In line with the Official Public Health Order to slow the spread of COVID-19, “shelter-in-place” has been issued for all San Francisco residents that is expected to be in effect until further notice. As a result, Department of Human Resources (DHR)’s office (located at 1 South Van Ness Avenue, 4th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94103) is currently closed to the general public. If you have any questions, please feel free to email the Human Resources Analyst listed on this announcement.

Note:  While we are currently remote due to Covid-19, you are expected to attend in-person meetings throughout the City on a regular basis.

Applications will be screened for relevant qualifying experience. Additional screening mechanisms may be implemented in order to determine candidates’ qualifications. Only those applicants who most closely meet the needs of the Agency will be invited to participate in the selection process. Applicants meeting the minimum qualifications are not guaranteed advancement to the interview. Qualified applicants with disabilities requiring reasonable accommodation in the selection process must contact the Agency by phone at (415) 554-6000 or, if hearing impaired at (415) 554-6015 (TTY).

CONDITION OF EMPLOYMENT:  All City and County of San Francisco employees are required to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of employment. Someone is fully vaccinated when 14 days have passed since they received the final dose of a two-shot vaccine or a dose of a one-shot vaccine. Any new hire must present proof of full vaccination status to be appointed. Any new hire who will be routinely assigned or occasionally enter High-Risk Settings, must provide proof of having received a COVID-19 booster vaccine by March 1, 2022, or once eligible.

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.