Prize Designer – First Principles Thinker

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XPRIZE

WebsiteLinkedInAll Job Openings

51 - 200 employees

Founded 1995

🤝 Non-profit

🔬 Science

🌍 Social Impact

💰 $1.8M Grant on 2018-10

Non-profit • Science • Social Impact

XPRIZE is a non-profit organization committed to inspiring and empowering humanity to achieve breakthroughs that accelerate an abundant and equitable future for all. Founded to address major global challenges, XPRIZE organizes competitions across focus areas such as biodiversity, climate, energy, deep tech, food, water, waste, health, learning, society, space, and exploration. These competitions set clear and measurable goals to stimulate innovation worldwide, leveraging a network of experts and a rigorous prize model to validate and celebrate the resulting solutions. XPRIZE competitions have engaged thousands of global teams, encouraging creativity from a diverse range of participants, including scientists and innovators from various fields.

📋 Description

• 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