I'm Kriss, a lead product designer. I turn complex, high-stakes problems into products that ship. I lead across design, product, and engineering while staying hands-on with the work: designing the experience and building when it moves the work forward.
Most recently, I was a Senior Staff UX Designer at PayPal. I owned end-to-end design for in-store payment experiences through a major launch and built the pixel-accurate prototypes that became the team's standard for leadership demos. I also designed and built two internal AI tools now in regular use across the design org.
Before that, I led and mentored design teams at NBC News across election coverage, live news, and the company's first generative AI features. Our 2024 Presidential Election coverage delivered record traffic and the highest overall user rating among NBC News and seven leading competitors.
Tight deadlines, big audiences, and constraints that shift under you are familiar ground.
I'm looking for a Lead or Staff Product Designer role where I can set direction on complex product work and stay close to the people building it. Open to remote, hybrid, or on-site. Here’s what I bring:
Led and mentored three design teams, turning high-stakes ambiguity into a path they could execute against.
Aligned design, product, engineering, content and research around decisions that teams could actually act on.
Built prototypes at the fidelity each problem needed, from rough explorations to pixel-accurate flows.
Shipped generative AI features, built internal tools now in regular use, and taught teams to build with AI.
Built reusable systems that held design consistent and raised both quality and speed across web, mobile and TV.
Used research, analytics, testing and accessibility feedback to simplify experiences that had grown complex.
Kriss is a powerhouse builder. He's great to work with and is proactive in wielding AI to create detailed and robust products and prototypes that help align stakeholders, from design leadership to PMs to engineers. He's also a delight to work with - positive, upbeat and enthusiastic, great at taking and giving feedback, proactively looking for opportunities to add more value to the team.
I worked with Kriss on the Money Movement Platform team at PayPal, where he owned In-Store QR design and visual QA. He migrated our Show-to-Pay flow from legacy to current architecture, designed the QR full-screen takeover experience, and built the Replit prototype we used for leadership demos. Beyond design, he raised dozens of visual QA bugs himself, catching issues before they reached customers.
Kriss also built two internal AI tools on his own initiative: a FigJam summarizer and a content accessibility checker, then ran pairing sessions to teach teammates to build their own. That combination, strong craft plus a drive to make the whole team faster, is rare.
He asked sharp questions before diving into a design and earned trust from engineering and content partners on judgment calls, not just execution. Any team would be lucky to have him. Great work Kriss!
I've had the great pleasure of working with Kriss for the past seven years at NBC News, where he has consistently proven himself to be an exceptional UX design lead and a trusted collaborator. Kriss brings a rare combination of creativity, adaptability, and thoughtfulness to every project he touches.
As a Software Engineering Lead, I’ve partnered closely with Kriss on numerous high-impact initiatives, including our election coverage experiences. His design insight and deep understanding of both user needs and technical constraints have been instrumental in creating interfaces that are visually compelling, highly intuitive, and beautiful. Kriss has an innate ability to balance aesthetics with usability; he always considers the bigger picture when pitching new ideas.
Kriss consistently goes above and beyond to ensure the end product meets the highest standards of quality. He’s someone you can count on to deliver smart, strategic, and user-centered design solutions, making him an invaluable asset to any team. I can’t recommend him highly enough.
Kriss is an incredible UX Design leader. My role at NBCUniversal was to build an enterprise accessibility program. I knew when I started in early 2020, that our success would depend on getting our Designers to the table - engaged, learning, and practicing inclusive design. Kriss was the first person at that table for our News group, and he stayed, and learned, and advocated, and led, and practiced, and shared, and modeled for his organization, and again, led.
I had the pleasure of working closely with Kriss on NBCNews.com through 2 major election cycles - first the 2022 midterm elections, and then the 2024 Presidential election. Each time, I saw Kriss not only tackling many complex design problems in general, but also leaning into inclusive design practices, directly engaging with people from the disability community, and integrating those learnings for his whole team.
I couldn't have asked for a better Design partner and leader than Kriss. The fact that he also happens to be incredibly fun and joyful to work with is just icing on the cake!