Salary : $144,456.00 - $180,044.80 Annually
Location : County of San Mateo, CA
Job Type: Full-Time
Job Number: X275E
Department: Superior & Municipal Courts
Opening Date: 10/01/2026
Closing Date: 10/19/2026 11:59 PM Pacific
Bargaining Unit: 50J

Description
Position Overview & Operational Focus

Located in Redwood City at the Hall of Justice, at the heart of Silicon Valley, the Superior Court of California, County of San Mateo offers an exceptional opportunity to lead mission-critical, public-sector enterprise technology initiatives. We are seeking an experienced, proactive, and technically adept Court Information Technology Manager - Infrastructure.

This classification represents a fully engaged "working manager" role. Unlike purely administrative management roles, this position demands direct systems and network engineering participation alongside dedicated technical staff. The operational split is structured as follows:

• Technical Execution & Systems Engineering (~60%): Direct architecture, engineering implementation, platform transitions, hypervisor clustering, network configurations, perimeter security, and hands-on Tier-3 incident resolution.
• Project Governance, Strategy & Supervision (~40%): Operational workflow definition, runbook standardization, staff development and evaluations, project management, budgeting/forecasting, and technology vendor management.

Examples Of Duties
1. Technical Execution & Hands-On Engineering (~60%)

• Design, lead, and directly execute enterprise infrastructure migrations, including server hardware lifecycles, enterprise storage fabric (SAN/NAS), and virtualization platform transitions.
• Configure, maintain, and optimize enterprise hypervisor environments, managing live workloads, storage tiers, high-availability clusters, and cross-platform conversions.
• Serve as primary technical escalation authority for Tier-3 infrastructure outages, conducting deep-packet inspection, hypervisor diagnostic trace analysis, and directory services troubleshooting.
• Administer, harden, and monitor enterprise perimeter defense systems, next-generation firewalls, secure remote access tunnels, and zero-trust identity architectures.
• Architect, execute, and rigorously test multi-tier disaster recovery protocols, automated system snapshots, and immutable data backup integrity.
• Directly engineer campus-wide LAN/WAN networking, core routing protocols, access/distribution layer switching, and micro-segmented VLAN infrastructures.

2. Project Governance, Strategy & Supervision (~40%)

• Supervise, mentor, evaluate, and provide hands-on technical guidance to systems, network, and operational support personnel.
• Establish structured operational accountability, ticket workflows, and change management using centralized ITSM, knowledge base, and project platforms.
• Author and institutionalize comprehensive standard operating procedures (SOPs), system runbooks, network topology diagrams, and disaster recovery plans.
• Manage enterprise hardware/software maintenance agreements, Statements of Work (SOWs), vendor deliverables, and technical solution RFP evaluations.
• Collaborate with court executive leadership to develop, justify, and monitor capital technology investments and annual operating budgets.

Qualifications
Minimum Qualifications & Technical Competencies

Qualifying Experience: Five (5) years of progressive, hands-on experience in enterprise systems engineering, network administration, or IT infrastructure operations. This experience must include at least two (2) years serving in a supervisory, team lead, principal systems engineer, or dedicated infrastructure project lead capacity.

Educational Foundation: Graduation from an accredited college or university with a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Management Information Systems, or a closely related discipline. (Additional qualifying hands-on infrastructure engineering experience may substitute for education on a year-for-year basis).

Desirable Certifications: Advanced professional enterprise infrastructure, virtualization, or networking credentials (e.g., Nutanix NCP/NCM, VMware VCP, Cisco CCNP, Fortinet NSE, or equivalent professional-level engineering credentials) are highly desirable but not required.

Application/Examination
This recruitment is Open & Promotional. Current classified employees of the County of San Mateo and the Superior Court of California with at least six months (1040 hours) of continuous service in classified regular, probationary, extra-help/limited term positions prior to the filing deadline receive five (5) promotional preference points on passing scores.

• Application Screening: Pass/Fail evaluation based strictly on minimum qualifications and technical screening responses submitted in the Supplemental Questionnaire.
• Panel Examination: Weighted 100%. Structured technical oral examination and scenario evaluation assessing architectural problem-solving, operational leadership, and diagnostic depth.

Depending on the number of applicants, an application appraisal of education and experience may be used in place of other examinations or further evaluation of work experience may be conducted to group applicants by level of qualification. All applicants who meet the minimum qualifications are not guaranteed advancement through any subsequent phase of the examination. All examinations will be given in County of San Mateo, California and applicants must participate at their own expense.

IMPORTANT: Applications for this position will only be accepted online. If you are currently on the County's website, you may click the "Apply" button. If you are not on the County's website, please apply at

Responses to the supplemental questions must be submitted in addition to our regular employment application form. A resume will not be accepted as a substitute for the required employment application and supplemental questionnaire.
TENTATIVE RECRUITMENT SCHEDULE
Final Filing Date: Monday, October 19, 2026 at 11:59 PM PST
Application Screening: Week of October 26, 2026Combined Civil Service and Departmental Panel Interview: Week of November 2, 2026 or November 9, 2026

01

IMPORTANT: Applicants for this position are asked to submit responses to the following supplemental questions. Responses to Question 2 and Questions 3 are required.Your responses will give us additional information about your background and experience related to this position, will weigh heavily in the application screening process, and will be used in the selection process. Be concise and specific. Clarity of expression, grammar, spelling, and ability to follow instructions will be considered in the evaluation process. While we understand AI can be a useful tool, please craft your responses to these questions yourself. We are interested in your description of your qualification.A resume will not be accepted as a substitute for your responses.I have read and understand these instructions.

• Yes
• No

02

Enterprise Cluster Migration & Risk MitigationYou are charged with architecting and executing a phased production migration of multi-node virtualized clusters from a legacy platform to a modern hypervisor architecture across court enterprise data centers.Part A: Pre-Flight Pilot Validation (Max 300 words) Walk through your technical checklist prior to initiating a 'pilot' workload migration. What specific compute, storage I/O, hypervisor driver/hardware compatibility, and network throughput metrics do you monitor to validate baseline stability before scheduling mission-critical cutovers?Part B: Live Incident Remediation & Zero Data Loss (Max 300 words) Describe an actual technical roadblock, data replication anomaly, or unexpected failure you encountered during an infrastructure or hypervisor transition. Detail the exact diagnostic steps, CLI utilities, or failback mechanisms you utilized to resolve the roadblock without data loss. Please include the agency in which you gained this experience.
03

Network Administration, Zero Trust & Name Resolution DiagnosticsMaintaining high availability, clean VLAN micro-segmentation, and resilient edge security is critical to supporting multi-facility court judicial proceedings and administrative operations.Part A: Architecture Trade-Offs - Legacy VPN vs. Identity-Driven Edge / ZTNA (Max 300 words)Analyze the architectural and security trade-offs between conventional client-to-site full-tunnel VPN topologies and identity-based Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) / Secure Access Service Edge frameworks. Under what specific operational constraints would you mandate one over the other for a hybrid public-sector workforce?Part B: Multi-VLAN DNS Resolution Root Cause Isolation (Max 300 words) Following a firewall policy and routing update across campus switches, workstations on two specific VLANs experience intermittent name resolution failures for an essential internal application server, while other subnets remain unaffected. Detail your systematic diagnostic process, identifying the exact command-line tools, network layer inspections, and log reviews you execute to isolate the root cause.
04

How did you learn about this position?

• County of San Mateo Website
• County of San Mateo Job Interest Card Notification
• County Hosted Virtual Event
• County Hosted Job Fair
• CalOpps.org
• Civic Match
• College/University Career Center
• Community-based Organization Posting
• Facebook/Instagram
• Friend or Relative
• GovernmentJobs.com
• Indeed
• Job Fair
• LinkedIn
• Professional Publication/Website (Please specify in next question)
• X (formerly called Twitter)
• Zip Recruiter
• Other (Please specify in next question)

05

If you answered, "Professional Publication/Website" or "Other" to the above question, please indicate below how you learned about this position. Your response to this question will help us in better marketing County jobs. Type NA if not applicable.
Required Question