N8+US.
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.

IBM 5081 · 80 COL N8+US ///
PUNCH: IMAGINATION → IMPLEMENTATION REV 2026
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.

Leadership, proven at scale.

Technical direction and team leadership across major-brand agency delivery, an 11-year Staff-engineer run at BuzzFeed, and now solo studio delivery — applied today as fractional leadership through N8+US.

  • Built and led a 36-person blended interactive team at OLSON (12 full-time + 24 contract) delivering across 100+ clients.
  • Director of Technology at Schematic — Target.com navigation redesign, delivery coordinated across New York, Los Angeles, and Costa Rica.
  • Client pitches and new business, mentoring and performance management, conference speaking on interactive and web technology.
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

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

Selected brands — agency & independent engagements. Names shown as text; trademarks belong to their owners.

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.

Start a project.

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

~/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 ↗