← Oli Nelson

Hire me

A freelance AI product engineer who ships, end-to-end.

I take AI-native products from a blank page to live in production — discovery, design, full-stack build, and deploy. Founder’s instincts, engineer’s hands. Open to technical-cofounder, product-engineer, and freelance work.

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Open to technical-cofounder, product-engineer, and freelance work.

How I can help

What you’re actually hiring.

AI product engineering

LLM and agent features that actually ship — RAG, vision, multi-modal pipelines, and the product UX around them. I’ve shipped 4+ AI products to production.

0→1 MVP builds

Blank page to a real, in-market product. I’ve founded and launched my own — I move fast without leaving a mess for the next engineer.

Technical cofounder

Founder’s instincts plus engineer’s hands. Product, architecture, branding, and pricing — owned end-to-end while you find product-market fit.

Full-stack delivery

Rails, TypeScript/React, Node, Python, Hotwire. I collapse microservices, rebuild onboarding, and ship net-new surfaces on real production codebases.

Selected work

Things I’ve built, and what they did.

01 Founder · AI-native

Ricordi

An AI-native platform for music lessons — record a lesson and “Bartók” turns it into a timestamped practice plan automatically.

  • Built the full product end-to-end: AI lesson analysis (recording → timestamped practice plans), a shared student workspace, and a unified teacher/student/parent chat thread.
  • Shipped web and native — in invite-only beta, with a Hotwire Native iOS app in App Store review.
  • Own everything: product, the AI pipeline, full-stack build, branding, and pricing.
Ruby on Rails Anthropic Hotwire Hotwire Native iOS
ricordi.ai
02 Uscreen · 0→1

AI Thumbnail Generator

An end-to-end system that turns any video into high-converting, on-brand thumbnails — automatically.

  • Built the full pipeline: Mux frame extraction → GPT vision scoring → industry-aware templates.
  • Optimised the model and pipeline to make per-thumbnail cost viable at production scale.
  • Shipped as a net-new product surface, owned end-to-end.
Ruby on Rails Python OpenAI Mux React
03 Founder · live product

Maestrocast

A real-time video platform built specifically for online music teaching — control student cameras, annotate sheet music live, share handouts, and manage lessons in one place. The product whose lessons led to Ricordi.

  • Designed and built a low-latency video platform from scratch: live annotation, high-fidelity audio, recording.
  • Owned everything — full-stack, UX, branding, and pricing — and put it in front of real users: a paying studio runs ~30 lessons a week on it.
  • Ran customer discovery directly with music teachers and iterated around their workflow.
Ruby on Rails WebRTC Hotwire
maestrocast.com
04 Rapid Global · shipped in 2 weeks

Safety Agent

A multi-modal AI agent that watches real-time video feeds to detect on-site hazards and accidents, alerting customers the moment something goes wrong.

  • Built and shipped to production in two weeks.
  • Paired with a conversational AI surfacing site status, compliance, and attendance insights.
Scala Node.js TypeScript AWS React

More things I’ve built

Welcome App V2

Rapid Global

Collapsed 3+ microservices into a single full-stack React Router app handling thousands of facial-recognition events daily.

TypeScript · React · Node.js

Uscreen product surfaces

Uscreen

Link in Bio, bookable Coaching Events (Zoom + Google Calendar), a Starter tier, and a rebuilt onboarding flow.

Ruby on Rails · Hotwire · React

Real-time AI Chat

Rapid Global

A conversational AI surfacing live site status, compliance, check-ins, and attendance insights.

Node.js · TypeScript · React

Integrations platform

Nirovision

A business-critical platform syncing customer data across MYOB, Employment Hero, and other external systems.

Scala · Node.js · TypeScript · React

Diagnostics viewer

iCare

A performant, visually-synced multi-image viewer for eye-care clinicians — filters, zoom, pan, and compare.

Kotlin · React

Billing automation

Nirovision

Automated Stripe + Xero billing with guided checkout and account setup, removing manual work for finance.

Node.js · TypeScript

Recruiter Flow

WithYouWithMe

A guided workflow walking recruiters through the applicant process end-to-end.

JavaScript · React

Freelance builds

2019–2020

A psychologist booking platform, a podcast transcription + search app, and a Bitcoin music marketplace.

Ruby on Rails · Node.js · TypeScript · Svelte · React

FAQ

Common questions.

What does Oli Nelson do?

Oli is a product engineer and founder who ships AI-native products end-to-end — discovery, design, full-stack build, and deploy. He has shipped 4+ AI products to production and founded multiple 0→1 products.

Is Oli available for freelance or contract work?

Yes. Oli is open to technical-cofounder, product-engineer, and freelance/contract work, available remotely worldwide. Email olivernelson@hey.com to start a conversation.

Does Oli work remotely?

Yes — Oli is based in Australia and works remotely with teams worldwide.

What technologies does Oli work with?

Ruby on Rails, TypeScript, Node.js, React, Python, Scala, and Hotwire, plus the OpenAI and Anthropic APIs for AI features. Infrastructure across AWS, PostgreSQL, Redis, Sidekiq, Stripe, Mux, and WebRTC.

Can Oli be a technical cofounder?

Yes. Oli has founded and built his own products (Ricordi, Maestrocast) end-to-end and is open to technical-cofounder arrangements for the right venture.

How do you start working together?

Email olivernelson@hey.com with a short description of what you’re building. Oli will reply with whether it’s a fit and suggest a first call.