Lead Generalist Futures Prototyper

Job description

Requisition ID: 1644957-FP

Your key responsibilities

• Executive impact: Engage and challenge senior client and EY stakeholders with commercially sharp, artifact-backed perspectives on emerging technology, organizational change, and future operating conditions.
• Strategic leadership: Define a prototyping and activation strategy for Thematic Insights that translates analysis into tangible points of view and market-facing experiences.
• Prototype development: Build and oversee high-fidelity artifacts across paper, software, hardware, service concepts, and executive communication formats to make future scenarios inspectable.
• Thought leadership activation: Participate in client meetings, workshops, roundtables, and external events; use prototypes and artifacts as instruments for dialogue, not just illustration.
• Cross-domain synthesis: Combine qualitative and quantitative sources into structured points of view that connect technology themes to strategy, transactions, transformation, and operating-model change.
• Method building: Develop repeatable approaches that let EY teams move from weak signals to scenario artifacts, executive insight packages, and client-ready interventions.
• Collaboration and knowledge sharing: Work closely with analysts, sector teams, designers, technologists, and client-serving leaders to spread best practices for artifact-based insight work.

Skills and attributes for success

• Outstanding executive-level presentation and facilitation skills, with the ability to challenge and shape the perspectives of senior clients and internal decision-makers.
• Demonstrated 12+ years of relevant experience in a fast-moving, client-driven, research, strategy, design, or innovation environment.
• Strong analytical skills, with the ability to synthesize multiple perspectives, review data inputs, and translate them into compelling strategic points of view.
• Evidence of serious making practice: you can prototype in more than one medium and know when software, hardware, paper, or service enactment is the right vehicle.
• Experience creating futures-oriented artifacts, scenarios, speculative prototypes, design fictions, or adjacent forms of evidence-making that help people reason about change.
• Succinct and structured oral and written communication skills, with the ability to explain complex concepts clearly and concisely across technical and non-technical audiences.
• Collaborative mindset, able to work independently and as part of a global, multi-cultural, and virtual environment.
• Comfort operating as a generalist with unusual range across engineering, research, design, strategy, and public explanation.

What we look for

• Formal engineering training combined with advanced study or deep experience in technology and society, HCI, design research, media, history, or related fields.
• Founder/operator experience, especially in hardware or software ventures where concept, prototyping, manufacturing, logistics, and market activation required direct ownership.
• A visible body of writing, publishing, lecturing, teaching, or community-building that demonstrates public legibility and original method-making.
• Experience leading workshops, seminars, executive sessions, or immersive programs that help organizations build confidence under uncertainty.
• Evidence of patented or otherwise inventive systems work, especially where research, design, engineering, and commercialization intersect.
• Experience working across institutions such as universities, cultural organizations, startups, and large enterprises.

The opportunity

• Create a recurring futures prototyping program for domain leaders that converts priority themes into artifacts, client sessions, and market-facing points of view.
• Develop an executive-ready prototype package on a major technology transition that includes a demonstrator, a strategic memo, and a workshop format for senior stakeholders.
• Build a series of plausible future operating documents that help clients reason about AI, automation, and organizational adaptation without defaulting to generic trend language.
• Prototype a tangible client experience in Princeton that combines thematic insight, artifact exhibition, and facilitated decision-making for C-suite audiences.
• Codify a generalist method for moving from research signal to tangible prototype to commercial activation.

What we offer you

• At EY, we’ll develop you with future-focused skills and equip you with world-class experiences.

• We’ll empower you in a flexible environment and fuel your extraordinary talents in a diverse and inclusive culture of globally connected teams.

• We offer a comprehensive compensation and benefits package where you’ll be rewarded based on performance and recognized for the value you bring to the business.

• Join us in our team-led and leader-enabled hybrid model. Our expectation is for most people in external, client-serving roles to work together in person 40-60% of the time over the course of an engagement, project, or year.

• Under our flexible vacation policy, you’ll decide how much vacation time you need based on your personal circumstances.

• This role is based in Princeton, New Jersey and will include travel for client meetings, workshops, and executive programs.

Additional context