He married Jordan Burns in August 2000 and divorced in December 2011. He mainly resides in Austin, Texas, after briefly spending time in Los Angeles, California. He is a member of the International Academy of Web Television. Burns became engaged to The Know host Ashley Jenkins in early 2016. They married in June 2019. They have a son, born on August 25, 2019.

There, he met his co-workers and future Red vs. Blue collaborators Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola. In June 2002, Burns teamed up with his colleagues to create their first viral video, a Mac Gamer Switch parody.

Burns joined Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola in one of their many Internet ventures, drunkgamers.com creating voiceover-enhanced gameplay videos for the website. The trio were giant enthusiasts of the 2001 first-person shooter video game Halo: Combat Evolved, leading them to discuss whether an automobile in the game known as a Warthog looks like a puma. Burns has said that this discussion was “the spark for the whole series”. Seeing potential for a full story, Burns created a trailer for Red vs. Blue, which was released September 5, 2002 on the drunkgamers website, but it was largely ignored, and, for unrelated reasons, drunkgamers soon closed. Four months later, Computer Gaming World contacted Ramsey for permission to include a different drunkgamers video in a CD to be distributed with the magazine. Ramsey granted permission, but he and Burns felt that they needed a website to take advantage of the exposure from Computer Gaming World. They therefore resurrected Red vs. Blue and re-released the trailer to coincide with the Computer Gaming World issue. Burns founded the production company Rooster Teeth to produce the show with Sorola, Ramsey, Matt Hullum and Joel Heyman. The first episode was released on April 1, 2003. The series is primarily produced using the machinima technique of synchronizing video footage from a game to pre-recorded dialogue and other audio.

In 2004, 13 months after the first season of Red vs. Blue had finished airing, Burns and Matt Hullum created the comedy web series The Strangerhood. The series uses the same machinima technique used to film Red vs. Blue.

The idea for the series came from the E3 gaming convention where Burns and his Rooster Teeth partners were introduced to the life simulation game The Sims 2 and realized that the game would be suitable for a series that parodied reality television. The game’s publisher Electronic Arts allowed them to continue with the project. The series centers on eight strangers who awake one day unaware of where they are or how they arrived there. Its first season of 17 episodes completed on April 27, 2006. In 2005, the group collaborated with Paul Marino on Strangerhood Studios, a spin-off commissioned by the Independent Film Channel. This spin-off was the first machinima series to be commissioned for broadcast and won an award for Best Editing at the 2005 Machinima Film Festival.

The series completed its original five season 100-episode run on June 28, 2007, collectively known as the Blood Gulch Chronicles. Subsequent seasons were re-tooled with The Recollection Trilogy for seasons 6–8 (Reconstruction, Recreation, and Revelation), and The Freelancer Saga for seasons 9 and 10. Since season eleven, which premiered on June 14, 2013, Burns handed directorial and head writing duties to Miles Luna to shift his focus onto other projects. He still provides voice work for characters such as Church, Lopez and Vic.

On December 29, 2008 Burns co-hosted the inaugural episode of the Drunk Tank audio podcast, alongside his Rooster Teeth co-workers Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola. The podcast consists largely of comedic commentary on the popular culture of the week, including video games, recent news, website features, sports and upcoming projects and is available for download through iTunes, Zune Marketplace and their website. It has since become one of the more popular features of the site, at one point becoming the #1 most downloaded podcast on iTunes, as well as a featured podcast in the iTunes Store. New episodes have been released regularly every Wednesday since April 10, 2009, with occasional special episodes or multiple releases in one week.

Burns began co-hosting Immersion alongside Griffon Ramsey in 2010. The show tests the concepts of video games in real life, such as whether the heckling that sometimes occurs in multiplayer video games would negatively affect the performance of real soldiers. Burns joked in The Rooster Teeth Podcast that the series started as an “elaborate way for [them] to do fun stuff and get paid for it”. Geoff Ramsey and Gus Sorola were the test subjects throughout the first season. Gavin Free and Michael Jones (of Achievement Hunter) served as the test subjects for the second season.

In September 2011, the podcast was renamed The Rooster Teeth Podcast. The show has since become available in video form and Burns continues to make regular appearances. On January 7, the podcast won “Best Gaming Podcast” at the 8th Annual Podcast Awards. The Rooster Teeth Podcast has recently adapted a new style of doing podcasts in which they live stream to “sponsors” on their website, in video, the night before the release of the audio podcast on iTunes and their site. The sponsor live stream is then later available 1 day on the Rooster website and 2 days later on YouTube.

On Halloween 2012, a partnership between Rooster Teeth and Blip was announced, with the premiere of their new 10-episode, reality game competition series sponsored by GEICO. The Gauntlet follows gamers from around the United States competing in contests of skills, concentration, agility and stamina, inspired by reality competitions Wipeout and The Voice. The first season was hosted by Ali Baker and Burns. Season two was hosted by Burns and Joel Heyman and began on September 7, 2013.

His producing work includes executive producing the 2012 documentary film Minecraft: The Story of Mojang, about the Swedish video game developer Mojang, the creators of the popular video game Minecraft. In 2013, he began executive producing the anime-influenced web series RWBY, created by Rooster Teeth employee Monty Oum. A second season premiered in 2014. Oum died on February 1, 2015. A third season of the show premiered on October 24, 2015. In 2014, Burns served as executive producer on the show X-Ray and Vav, a cartoon web series starring two Achievement Hunter employees (a video gaming division of Rooster Teeth) Gavin Free and Ray Narvaez, Jr. In 2016, Burns and Gavin Free hosted the documentary World’s Greatest Head Massage: An ASMR Journey.

In June 2014, Rooster Teeth launched a crowdfunding campaign for the film Lazer Team on Indiegogo. The fundraiser reached its $650,000 goal in under 10 hours and broke Indiegogo’s record for the fastest film campaign to reach $700,000. Within three days, Lazer Team broke $1 million. As of 2015, Lazer Team held the record for the highest funded film campaign on Indiegogo with over $2.4 million collected.

The pilot episode of Million Dollars, But… premiered on May 21, 2015, with the series continuing on July 9, 2015. The ongoing series is frequently co-hosted by Burns and Gavin Free, with another special guest taking part. Each person has to come up with a typically difficult scenario, for example one where the person has to date Adolf Hitler for a year — which the cast comically re-enact — for which they will be given a million dollars.

Burns appeared in the 2015 short film, Hit, as Officer Harris and the sports comedy-drama The Outfield. Burns appeared in the YouTube Red series 12 Deadly Days from Blumhouse Television.

Burns has participated in two episodes of the improvisational comedy game show @midnight. In 2015, Burns took part in twenty-eighth season of The Amazing Race with his fiancée, Ashley Jenkins, coming in fourth place. In 2017, Burns made a brief cameo in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia as a bar patron with no lines. In September 2017, alongside Jenkins, he co-hosted the inaugural Purpose Awards, an expansion from the Streamy Awards.

Burns explained during the campaign that as it makes more money, the film’s budget scales up. “The initial budget for talent was based on making the movie on the bare minimum with us throwing in the remainder of the expected budget. For instance, that meant using talent almost exclusively from in-house. As the budget grows, so do our opportunities to approach all kinds of talent. The same applies to Visual FX, quality of props and costuming, lighting, crew, etc.” Burns co-wrote, co-produces, and co-stars in the film as Hagan. It was released in January 2016, making it among the first titles that Rooster Teeth’s parent company, Fullscreen, will be distributing in its newly launched feature film division.

Burns announced his resignation from Rooster Teeth on June 11, 2020, as he was moving away from the United States. Rooster Teeth maintains a first-look deal on his projects.