What's the Role and What You'll Do

It’s 7:52 a.m. Somewhere in Mountain View, a firefighter is reading a text: \"The baby is coming three weeks early\". A librarian is opening a test result from their physician. A parks maintenance worker just found out their mom needs care, and they’ll have to help with her care. None of them are thinking about “Human Resources” right now.

But in a few days, they will be. And when they are, they will find you.

This is a job about the moments people don't plan for. The new parent who needs to understand their leave. The employee facing a diagnosis who needs their coverage to just work.

And the employee with twenty-two years who is retiring? They are not thinking about HR. They are thinking about what their life is about to become. But first, they are going to sit across from you with a stack of paperwork, a head full of questions, and more anxiety than they expected. The only reason they leave that meeting ready to walk into their next chapter is that you made the complicated feel manageable, and made them feel like someone had their back.

Benefits, leaves, and HRIS is the quiet machinery underneath every one of those moments, and the person in this role is the person who keeps it running with accuracy, warmth, and care.

We could hand you a list of duties. We will, further down. But first we want you to understand what the job actually is: you are the person who makes our employees feel like someone has their back. That care shows up in the concrete details: a correctly processed claim, a leave request that goes smoothly, a retirement that unfolds exactly the way it was promised.

The Essentials

Why We’re Doing This Differently: Most job postings describe a role. We’d rather describe a difference. The City of Mountain View believes Human Resources is the heartbeat of the organization, and that we have to practice “Community for All” within our own workforce before we can help other departments practice it with the public. This role is where that belief becomes real: one employee, one life event, one system at a time.

We’re also in a genuine moment of change. The City is modernizing how it delivers benefits, and putting real investment behind wellness and financial security for its employees. This isn’t a role about keeping things exactly as they are. You’ll help shape the next version of how the City cares for its people, and help build the Mountain View of tomorrow, together.

Why Local Government: You could take these skills to a company down the road and probably earn a bigger number doing it. Here’s what that number can’t buy. Local government is the level of government closest to people’s everyday lives, the one that shows up in the parks, the libraries, the water that runs, and the streets that get fixed. And the people who make all of that happen are the people you would take care of.

Think about who that is. The firefighter. The librarian. The park maintenance crew. When you get someone’s leave right, or their coverage, or the retirement they spent a career earning, you are looking after the people who look after everyone else in Mountain View. There is no shareholder here and no product to sell. The return on your work is a public one, measured in employees who feel supported enough to keep serving the community. That is a purpose you can see out the window, and it is the reason this work matters more here than almost anywhere else you could do it.

Benefits and leaves are exactly that work. It’s a conversation across a table with someone on the hardest week of their life. It’s reading the room, catching what a form can’t tell you, and reassuring a person that their leave, their coverage, their retirement will be handled by someone who cares that it’s right. That’s why this role is not fully remote, not so we can watch you work, but because the work itself is human, and it’s better done shoulder to shoulder.

It’s also why we value being together as a team. Good things happen when people share the same space: ideas move faster, newer team members learn by watching how experienced colleagues handle a tricky moment, and the kind of trust that makes hard work feel lighter has room to grow. It’s how we live out Community for All inside our own department first. The person who thrives here values being present with colleagues and with the employees they serve, because the connection is the point.

Are We a Match?

A Week In The Role: Here’s what the work looks like, told the way it actually happens:

Monday. A benefits platform you’re helping implement goes a little smoother than last month. You catch a data mismatch in the HRIS before it becomes someone’s wrong paycheck. Quiet wins nobody sees, except the people they protect.

Tuesday. An employee sits across from you, overwhelmed, trying to understand FMLA, CFRA, and how their disability leave fits together. You make the complicated feel manageable. They leave breathing easier. Later that afternoon, you meet with your team. You check in on their caseload, coach through a tricky situation, and make sure they have what they need to do right by the employees they support.

Wednesday. You’re deep in the interactive process on a reasonable accommodation, balancing law, empathy, and practicality, helping a manager and an employee find a path that works for both.

Thursday. Open enrollment planning. Vendor coordination. A wellness initiative you’re expanding. You’re thinking about how to make next year’s experience clearer than this year’s.

Friday. You automate a step that used to eat an afternoon, and you build in a review checkpoint, because your name is on the result, and “the system did it” is never a good enough answer.

Is This You? Somewhere out there is a person who reads all of the above and feels something click. This person:

Finds a strange satisfaction in getting complicated things exactly right, and knows that in benefits and leaves, “exactly right” is the whole job.

Can explain a confusing policy to a scared or stressed person and leave them calmer than when they arrived.

Loves a clean dataset, a smart workflow, and a system that finally does what it should.

Treats people’s private information, medical, financial, and personal, with complete confidentiality.

Wants to go deep and become an expert, not spread thin as a generalist.

Leads and develops others, and understands that a team that feels supported is what makes accurate, caring service possible at scale.

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What You'd Actually Own: For the practical among us, and you should be practical, here’s the scope in plain terms:

Administering the City’s benefit programs (health, retirement, and related plans), open enrollment, life events, and vendor coordination.

Administering and coordinating employee leaves, including FMLA/CFRA, Pregnancy Disability Leave, and coordination with the worker's compensation team, and guiding the interactive process for accommodations and disability-related leave.

Expanding wellness and financial security programming that helps employees live better, not just work better. Over time, you will step into a leadership role on both the citywide wellness committee and the deferred compensation committee as your expertise and bandwidth grow. We will start with one and build from there. That kind of trajectory is earned, and this is the role where you earn it.

Strengthening the City’s HRIS and benefits administration platform, including data integrity, automation, and paperless workflows, with a human review step you never skip.

Keeping the City compliant with applicable federal and state regulations, and turning research into clear recommendations for leadership and goal-setting.

The Practical Part:

Compensation. Full range $126,037 to $189,056 annually ; control point $157,547 . Flexible within the range based on experience, specialized expertise, and internal equity. Nonrepresented, exempt.

Schedule. Hybrid, typically three days a week in the office at City Hall, 500 Castro Street, next to Downtown Mountain View. Option for a 9/80 schedule. Not fully remote, because some of this work is better done face-to-face.

What you’ll need. Equivalent to a bachelor’s degree in human resources management, public administration, business administration, organizational development, or a related field; and three years of increasingly responsible professional human resources experience in benefits administration, leave administration, and/or human resource information systems, preferably in a public sector agency.

One Last Thing: Here’s the balance we want to strike. This description paints a full picture of the work, and very few people will see themselves in every single line of it. Please don’t count yourself out because one area feels unfamiliar. If you meet the minimum qualifications listed above and something here made you think “that’s the kind of work I want to be good at,” we genuinely want to hear from you.

And here’s something we will never automate: a real person reads every application. Each one that meets the minimum qualifications is reviewed individually by one of our recruiters, not by AI, and not by a screening system. It may mean we take a little longer to get back to you, and we believe that tradeoff is worth it because you took the time to apply, and you deserve a human on the other side of it. So give us the chance to learn about you rather than screening yourself out too early.

The firefighter. The police officer on night shift. The librarian. The parks maintenance worker. They are counting on someone like you to make the hardest weeks of their lives a little easier.

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