I'm Kriss, a lead product designer. I take complex, high-stakes problems and turn them into products that ship. I lead work across design, product, and engineering while staying hands-on with the craft.
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 used daily 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. Based in the Seattle area, 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 daily 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 had the pleasure of working with Kriss on AI initiatives across PayPal’s Consumer and Checkout experiences. He is incredibly smart, curious, and always willing to go the extra mile to solve tough problems and move ideas forward.
What stands out most about Kriss is his collaborative spirit. He brings people together, embraces new ideas, and makes every project better through thoughtful partnership. I learned a lot from working with him and would gladly work with him again. Any team would be lucky to have him.
Kriss has been a dedicated and impactful design team member for over 20 years, consistently delivering high-quality, consumer-centered digital products. He built strong relationships across editorial, design, product, and engineering teams, developed deep insights into audience needs, and played a key role in shaping some of our most successful news apps and websites. Most recently, his work on the 2024 Elections products contributed to record-breaking online traffic. Kriss is an exceptional product designer, and any team would benefit greatly from his experience, creativity, and leadership.
Kriss leads and designs with passion! He's continually pushing the work to be the best it can absolutely be, both his own and for his team. He's been in the industry a long time, but not as a passenger; he's led the team in adapting, innovating, and preparing for the future of design. He's incredibly resourceful and will always find a way to make great work happen! He pours time, care, and thoughtfulness into the growth and development of his team.
I had the privilege of working with him as he led design on the most successful digital election night experience in NBC News’s history. He ensured high quality work through every stage of the process, from concept through testing and launch. Kriss is a dedicated team player and a super solid and dependable leader.
I had the pleasure of working with Kriss for several years at NBC, where he was my team’s product designer. He brought a consistently positive, solutions-focused attitude to every project, no matter how stressful or high-stakes the environment. His passion for design and commitment to our team’s success made a big impact, especially for high-visibility, high-pressure events like elections.
Kriss is a true team player. He regularly went above and beyond, stepping up when needed and often contributing more than his share to ensure we delivered work we were proud of. He also pushed our junior designers to elevate their work, challenging them to explore alternatives and grow their creative thinking.
Kriss is one of the most passionate people I’ve worked with, and I’ve seen firsthand how that passion inspires those around him. I feel lucky to have worked with Kriss, and I know any team would be incredibly fortunate to have him as their designer!
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!
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.
I had the pleasure of working closely with Kriss for a little over a year at NBCU during one of the most high-stakes periods in recent memory: the 2024 general election. Throughout that time, he played a pivotal role in shaping our election coverage, leading the design of results pages, graphics, and data visualizations that not only stood out but became a defining feature of our national reporting. His work helped set a new standard for clarity, impact, and innovation in election storytelling.
Beyond his technical and creative contributions, Kriss is a decisive and strategic thinker, a strong collaborator, and a natural leader. He consistently brought clarity and direction to complex projects, and his ability to navigate shifting priorities and team changes was invaluable.
After the election, we continued to work together on a range of forward-looking initiatives, including AI-powered experiences to enhance our news coverage, interactive games, and scalable design systems. In every case, Kriss brought the same level of thoughtfulness, creativity, and leadership.
Kriss is a genuine pleasure to work with. Any team would be lucky to have him.
Kriss was a senior designer on my Product Design team who was a lead on many an ambitious project. He is someone I trust implicitly in putting in the thought, effort and dedication to make a product really sing.
What is remarkable about Kriss is that he has taken the years of invaluable experience he has in media and evolved his thinking and his craft with continued curiosity, humility and a hunger for learning. Beyond user-centric thinking and his craft in execution Kriss is a trusted partner with engineering and product - bringing thoughtful discourse and rich past experience deploying front end code such that he can speak a common language with engineering to elevate our end product. And his warmth and humor always helped bring the design team closer together. So much of Kriss’ work is layered into the experiences across NBC News and I am grateful for having had such a reliable, thoughtful and impactful designer on my team.
Kriss has done hard time in media. That's made him incredibly skilled at absorbing new information, organizing it and visualizing it with a rare combination of speed, elegance and accuracy. Those are storytelling super-powers prized in any industry.
Kriss is one of my favorite designers that I've ever worked with. He's creative, versatile, and supremely practical. He will take a design problem, analyze the constraints and propose solutions that are both effective and elegant. He takes feedback well and iterates quickly to get to a great user experience. He's always willing to learn a new skill - advancing from graphic designer to front end web designer/developer over the several years I have known him. He's easy-going and reliable - someone I could always depend on to come through on deadline and serve as a leader within the team. I highly recommend Kriss and wouldn't hesitate to hire him again myself if the opportunity arose!
Kriss is a fun, talented, detail-oriented designer/developer, who is one of the go-to people you want on your team. You can throw just about any problem at him and he will come up with a fresh solution. His sense of humor, willingness to experiment, ability to juggle multiple priorities at once and institutional knowledge not only created better products but made Kriss a trusted lead on the team.