Prize Designer – First Principles Thinker
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Job Description
First-Principles Prize Designer at XPRIZE leading high-impact global incentive competitions to spark innovation. Collaborating with experts to design effective prize models for diverse fields.
Responsibilities:
- Lead the end-to-end design and development of XPRIZE competitions, from framing the problem and defining success metrics to conducting research, engaging stakeholders, shaping the prize model, and producing final design documentation.
- Work within a structured design process guided by the Prize Design Director and seek Director input at key decision points to stay aligned with organizational priorities and quality standards.
- Operate with a high degree of self-direction between check-ins with the Prize Design Director.
- Proactively surface blockers, risks, and decisions that need Director input rather than waiting for scheduled touchpoints.
- Adapt quickly when the Prize Design Director reprioritizes projects or shifts design direction mid-cycle, maintaining momentum and timelines.
- Develop project plans, budgets, and timelines, coordinating with the Project Manager so deliverables meet deadlines and quality standards.
- Work closely with internal teams and collaborators, keeping alignment with Domain Leads, leadership, and Advancement on strategy, content, and positioning.
- Fold operational, financial, and communications inputs from Finance, Marketing, and Operations into the prize model and documentation.
- Identify and engage external experts and stakeholders, including designing and facilitating workshops, technical interviews, and other participatory research to inform design choices.
- Facilitate productive sponsor relationships as requested, with clear communication, updates, and deliverables that align with sponsor goals and XPRIZE standards.
- Contribute to organization-wide ideation and concept development such as Global Visioneering and prize ideation/ “Moonshot” workshops.
- Maintain and improve XPRIZE’s prize design methodology by staying fluent in current processes and documentation, capturing lessons learned from past and active designs, and updating tools and practices.
- Serve as an internal resource on the prize design process and keep core documentation current.
- Elevate XPRIZE’s prize design process externally through presentations, publications, website content, and thought leadership.
Requirements:
- First-principles reasoning: builds a working understanding of an unfamiliar problem from first principles — developing a credible sense of scale, feasibility, and impact potential early enough to make good design decisions before investing significant time.
- Cross-disciplinary range: moves comfortably across unrelated fields (e.g. Energy/Nature/Climate to Learning/Society) and knows how to reach design-credible competence in a new domain fast.
- Education: Masters’ degree in a STEM field required. Recent PhD/post-doc encouraged. Candidates with equivalent analytical experience in rigorous, research-driven fields will be considered.
- Exceptional analytical and research experience in related disciplines may substitute for the education requirement.
- Demonstrates basic ability to use dimensional analysis or order-of-magnitude estimates to constrain a new problem.
- Applies research, analytical, and creative problem-solving in fields such as engineering, physical or life sciences, data science, economics, or other rigor-driven domains.
- Strong design and design-thinking skills: problem definition, decomposition into sub-problems, identifying the right problem to solve, and combining creative and analytical methods to find design elements.
- Command of core product management: budgeting, contractual compliance, client relations, and project design, execution, evaluation, and delivery.
- Produces high-quality research, analysis, and design deliverables under compressed timelines without losing rigor or accuracy.
- Runs several active projects at once and reprioritizes quickly when organizational needs shift, keeping a direct supervisor informed when timelines are at risk or scope is evolving.
- Comfortable taking direction from a senior design leader and executing independently within it.
- Knows what to decide alone and what to escalate.
- Communicates clearly and credibly with experts and external stakeholders, orally and in writing, and matches style and standards to the audience.
- Exceptionally strong technical presentation skills: able to adapt depth and framing for expert and non-expert audiences equally.
- Familiar with research and data platforms (e.g. Google Scholar, PubMed, Scopus) and AI assisted research functions (e.g. Gemini Deep Research).
- Proficient with Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, and quick to pick up new productivity, research, and collaboration tools.
Benefits:
- Remote-first environment (must live and work in the United States)
- Quarterly company-paid All-Hands meetings in Los Angeles for frequent in-person collaboration
- Employee and dependent medical, dental, and vision options
- A 401(K) program with employer match
- Ample paid time off, including vacation, floating holidays, sick days, and company-paid holidays
- An Employee Assistance Program for confidential, professional support with personal, family, or other challenges
- Employee stipends/reimbursements for cell phone, internet, health & wellbeing, and learning & development
- Generous Paid Parental Leave for all employees welcoming a new child to their family
- One meeting-free block per week and four focus weeks per year to ensure uninterrupted time for strategic projects
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