Nathan Hunsaker O'Brien: Creative Engineering Leader · AI-Native / Agentic Systems
n8plusus:~$whoami

A technologist who understands creative.

30 years driving imagination to real-world implementation. Today that space is AI-native, agentic development — where I push the limits daily.

▸ Start a project LinkedIn ↗
SELECTED WORK N8+US ///
PUBHUB 01 / 06
About01
Nathan Hunsaker O'Brien
N. O'BRIENFOUNDER //

Nathan O'Brien is the founder of Metatoy, an independent product studio, and consults through N8+US as a fractional CTO and AI architect. Before going independent he spent 11 years at BuzzFeed as a Staff engineer — owner of its social-publishing frontend and the engineer who proved its first agentic-AI patterns in production. Before that, a decade of agency leadership: Director of Technology at Schematic on Target.com, growing OLSON's interactive team from 4 to 36, and early web work at Fallon and Martin·Williams — BMWFilms, Bahamas.com — back to 1995. Every era has been the same job, done at the newest seam between design and engineering. Today that seam is AI.

Experience02

Trusted by teams building for the world's biggest names.

Selected brands — agency & independent engagements. Names shown as text; trademarks belong to their owners.
AI / Agentic LLM orchestration multi-agent workflows MCP servers agentic migrations Claude Code
Frontend React Next.js TypeScript design systems & tokens Playwright
Backend / Infra Node.js Python PostgreSQL Redis Docker GitHub Actions
Mobile SwiftUI two apps in TestFlight beta
Services03

What I take on.

Service 01 Fractional CTO / Technical Leadership Technical direction, architecture, and team building — mentoring engineers, setting standards, and translating between business, creative, and engineering.
Service 02 AI-Native & Agentic Delivery Agentic migrations, LLM orchestration, and MCP integration — production AI features with measured outcomes, not demos.
Service 03 Design ↔ Engineering Bridge Enterprise-grade front-end engineering — React, TypeScript, Next.js. Mobile-first, accessible, performance-tuned web applications with deep API and system integration, large-scale migrations, and the automated testing and QA that keep them shippable.
Service 04 Internal Tools & Social Publishing Custom solutions to manage digital content — from social-media publishing platforms to on-site promotion tools, and the operator workflows around them.
Portfolio04

Case studies — a decade of publishing, promotion & sharing platforms.

Case study 01 PubHub Social publishing across four networks — planner, guided composer, account health, and automation a human approves. 10 yrs owning the frontend · agentic Next.js migration Case study 02 Callout On-site promotions admin — five-step wizard and a live WYSIWYG preview driven by the real production renderer. Sole author of the admin tier, from scratch in Next.js Case study 03 Tag Yourself Shareable quiz results — personalized images generated at scale, and a share loop that pulls readers back. +176% desktop share engagement · 59→69% returns
View all case studies → Illustrative clean-room reconstructions · two more in progress
Contact05

Start a project.

Tell me what you're building. I'll punch the card and get back to you.

Open Source06
~/metatoy — build in public
@metatoy/bootstrap-styled

A Bootstrap-5 React + styled-components library. Full-suite parity, published to npm. I build in the open — the same way I'd build with you.

$ npm install @metatoy/bootstrap-styled
github.com/nhunsaker/bootstrap-styled ↗