Product engineer & founder  //  Australia · working remotely worldwide

Founder’s instincts, engineer’s hands — blank page to shipped product.

I’ve founded and shipped my own products end-to-end — discovery, design, full stack, deploy — and I bring that same ownership to great teams.

Email me GitHub

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

Oli Nelson

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

Experience

Where I’ve shipped.

  1. 2025 — Present

    Product Engineer · Uscreen

    Ship net-new product surfaces end-to-end for a creator video platform — Link in Bio, AI Thumbnails, bookable coaching events (Zoom + Google Calendar), a Starter tier, a rebuilt onboarding flow — and lead the team’s adoption of AI-assisted development.

  2. 2025 — Present

    Founder · Maestrocast

    Founded and built a real-time video platform for online music teaching, from product and brand through to infrastructure.

  3. 2023 — 2025

    Full Stack Developer · Rapid Global

    Delivered AI features to production fast — a multi-modal safety agent, real-time AI chat, and a rebuilt site-compliance system — across a diverse set of services and stacks.

  4. 2020 — 2023

    Full Stack Developer · Nirovision

    Architected a modular integrations platform (MYOB, Employment Hero, and more) and an automated Stripe + Xero billing flow that removed manual work for finance.

Full CV available — email me and I’ll send it over.

Toolkit

What I reach for.

Languages & frameworks
TypeScript Node.js Ruby on Rails Python Scala React Svelte Vue Hotwire
AI & product
OpenAI API GPT vision AI agent design AI-assisted dev workflows activation analytics A/B testing
Infra & services
AWS Lambda Kinesis SQS PostgreSQL Redis Sidekiq Stripe Xero Mux WebRTC Zoom API Google Calendar API

The other half

Before software I was a professional drummer. I hold a Bachelor of Jazz Performance from the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, received the James Morrison Jazz Scholarship, finished on the podium at the Australian National Jazz Awards, and recorded albums reviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald. Being a musician implicitly taught me how theory and embodied knowledge must combine to really affect the world around you.

Stuff I’ve played on

↳ Piano Beach — piano + story for kids ↳ All Hands Piano Academy

Words

Occasional writing.

All writing (7) →