Ryan Keairns
Senior Team Lead, Platform UX & Design Systems
Seattle, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRyan Keairns is a Principal-level product designer and senior platform UX leader based in Seattle with 20+ years of experience and over a decade in senior roles shaping design systems and UX strategy. He currently leads three cross-functional teams at Elastic, driving consistent product experiences and mentoring designers, engineers, and researchers while aligning UX with business goals. A hands-on front-end practitioner, Ryan contributes to prominent open-source projects like Elastic's Kibana and EUI—improving theming, accessibility, icons, and editor tooling—bringing practical UI code experience to design leadership. His background spans technical SaaS, enterprise, and high-conversion consumer apps, pairing user research and A/B testing with front-end implementation skills (HTML/CSS/JS, TypeScript). Known for advancing design processes and systems, he blends strategic vision with the craft of pixel-level UI and accessibility improvements.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.), Finance, General, Bachelor of Business Administration (B.B.A.), Finance, General at University of Iowa
Stackoverflow
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Github Skills (18)
javascript10
eui10
typescript10
ui-design10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
elastic-ui10
typescripts10
react10
accessibility9
css-in-js9
css9
sys8
carbon-design-system8
system-design8
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
elastic/eui
Jan 2019 - Mar 2021
Elastic UI Framework 🙌
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:45 reviews, 25 commits, 137 PRs in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the UI of the EUI framework. Their commits focused on adding and updating various icons within the component library, including new icon additions and updates to existing ones. They also removed a duplicate prop in a component, improved badge colors, and added new glyphs for editor controls, which reflects significant involvement in enhancing the visual components of the framework. Furthermore, they converted radio form controls to TypeScript and added new accessibility components such as skip link, demonstrating an awareness of accessibility best practices.
elastic-uieuireactdesign-systemelasticsearch
elastic/kibana
May 2019 - Nov 2021
Your window into all of your data
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:651 reviews, 61 commits, 311 PRs in 2 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Ryan primarily contributed to the Kibana UI, focusing on visual and user experience improvements. Their commits include theming updates and adjustments to the ES|QL editor, enhancements to the Discover and Dashboard interfaces, and improvements to button styles and spacing. They also worked on updating login graphics and improving the loading experience in various UI components.
elasticdashboardskibanaobservabilitywindow
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