Kevin Leyton-Brown is a Professor of Computer Science and a Distinguished University Scholar at the University of British Columbia. He also holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute and is an associate member of the Vancouver School of Economics. He holds a PhD and MSc from Stanford University (2003; 2001) and a BSc from McMaster University (1998). He studies artificial intelligence, mostly at the intersection of machine learning and (1) the design and operation of electronic markets and (2) the design of heuristic algorithms.

He has co-written two books, "Multiagent Systems" and "Essentials of Game Theory," and over 100 peer-refereed technical articles; his work has received over 18,000 citations and an h-index of 54. He is an Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; awarded in 2020) and the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI; awarded in 2018). He was a member of a team that won the 2018 INFORMS Franz Edelman Award for Achievement in Advanced Analytics, Operations Research and Management Science, described as "the leading O.R. and analytics award in the industry." This award recognizes a "completed, practical application that had significant, verifiable and quantifiable impact on the performance of [a] client organization," in his case the Federal Communications Commission. Leyton-Brown also received UBC's 2015 Charles A. McDowell Award for Excellence in Research, a 2014 NSERC E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship—previously given to a computer scientist only 10 times since its establishment in 1965—and a 2013 Outstanding Young Computer Science Researcher Prize from the Canadian Association of Computer Science. He and his coauthors have received paper awards from AIJ, JAIR, ACM-EC, AAMAS and LION, and numerous medals for the portfolio-based SAT solver SATzilla at international SAT solver competitions (2003–15).

He served as Program Co-Chair for AAAI 2021, one of the top two international conferences on artificial intelligence. He has co-taught two Coursera courses on "Game Theory" to over 925,000 students (and counting!), and has received awards for his teaching at UBC—notably, a 2013/14 Killam Teaching Prize. He is past chair of the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce, which runs the annual Economics & Computation conference. He has served as an associate editor for the Artificial Intelligence Journal (AIJ), the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research (JAIR), ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation (ACM-TEAC), and AI Access; and was program chair for the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC) in 2012.