James Hanratty Open to lead roles

About

Hi, I'm James. I take messy product problems and ship work that performs.

I'm a hands-on design leader. The thing I care about is how products actually work for the people using them. At ESAB, I designed and launched two enterprise AI products from scratch, an AI search engine and a multilingual LLM assistant, cutting load time from 13 seconds to under a second. Earlier, as the sole designer at Bubbly Belle, I grew the brand from zero to $1.2M in monthly revenue. I'm a psychology major who codes. I build things that perform.

01 / Career

Experience

  1. 2021 to 2026

    ESAB Corporation

    UX Team Lead

    I scaled a cross-functional product team from 2 to 12 and owned UX strategy across a portfolio averaging 580K monthly sessions, shipping two enterprise AI products from the ground up and driving a 613% increase in lead generation at a global manufacturer.

  2. 2019 to 2021

    AtLarge / Atlas Networks

    Creative Director

    I led UX and front-end for global entertainment brands including Monster Jam, Disney On Ice, and SuperMotocross, redesigning a platform that served 340M+ monthly requests and delivered a 30% lift in ticket sales.

  3. 2017 to 2019

    Bubbly Belle

    Lead Designer / Front-End Developer

    As the sole designer at a five-person DTC startup, I owned every pixel from landing page to checkout and scaled the brand from zero to $1.2M in monthly revenue at a conversion rate four times the industry average.

  4. Earlier career

    Creative Director · Lead UX · Front-End

    I held Creative Director roles at Aureco Consulting and LiveSmart360, with earlier UX and front-end work at StarRizer and Glide Interactive, nearly a decade of director-level leadership before ESAB.

LinkedIn View resume
James Hanratty on a bench with a laptop, in pink pants and polka-dot socks

02 / Tools

Tool stack

AI has chewed through a lot of surface-level design work. The value now lives in systems thinking and knowing how to use the tools well. Here's the current rotation.

  • Figma
  • Claude
  • Photoshop
  • Illustrator
  • VS Code
  • Blender
  • Mouseflow
  • BrowserStack
  • Spotify

03 / Home

Off the clock

I have 14-year-old twins, Bronx and Ella, who just started 9th grade. Bronx won a statewide all-school art contest held by the Salvador Dali Museum, and his documentary about 9/11 went from Best Documentary at the county level to a top-three finish at the state finals. He also redesigned his high school's logo, the principal approved it for a schoolwide refresh this year, and he's now designing the seasonal and team variants. Ella is a budding anime artist and one hell of a sous chef when I'm cooking. The bar in this house is high.

My wife Amber runs Dirty Sara-Soda, a mobile dirty soda business here in Bradenton/Sarasota. By her own description, I'm her indentured servant in the trailer. I have no legal recourse and the tips are non-negotiable.

At home we have two bernedoodles: Louie, who's 7 and takes up more couch than is reasonable, and Teddy, who's 6 months old and is coming for the rest of it. Plus two cats, Keke and Mikah, who have made clear they don't answer to anyone.