Omar
Nembhard

Hi, I'm Omar.

I grew up in Queens and live in Tucson. I run a network cabling company with my dad, and this year I built an app that small businesses pay for. Right now I'm looking for my next job, in AI safety or animal welfare.

Columbia College, class of 2022
50 countries before I turned 18
Fluent in Swedish
Vegan since 2015

What I'm doing now

Open to relocating anywhere on Earth.

Berkeley, New York, DC, or remote would be my first picks.

Right now I'm looking for my next job, and I'd like it to be in AI safety or animal welfare. The obvious fit is operations or product. I've run operations at a company I co-founded for six years, and this year I shipped an iPhone app that people pay for. I also spent nine months in a cognitive neuroscience lab, so research and policy roles interest me too.

Two things I built this year are small versions of the problems I want to work on. Coordinex has an assistant that can change a schedule, so I made it draft the change and a person confirm it. PickItUp has a classifier, so I wrote the bar a new version has to clear before it ships. I want to work on the same questions where the stakes are much bigger.

If you're hiring, or you just want to talk about any of this, email me. I answer.

Things I've built and run

Coordinex

Founder, since February 2026.

coordinex.app

See it on the App Store

At Tritech, our cabling company, the logistics were a mess for years. Schedules got thrown together at the last minute, and we'd find out about a staffing gap when someone didn't show up to the job site. We had no single place that showed who was working where, and when. So I built one.

Coordinex is an iPhone app for small businesses that run hourly crews. The core is scheduling, time tracking and payroll. Expenses, inventory, approvals, documents, messaging and reports hang off those, and it works whether your people are W-2 employees, 1099 contractors, or both.

I designed the whole thing, from the login flow to the database to the Square, Stripe and Resend integrations, and I directed AI coding tools (Claude Code and Codex) to write the code. There's an assistant built in, too. A manager can ask it to plan next week's staffing from live sales data, or to find the shifts nobody is covering, and it drafts the change. A person always confirms before anything happens.

It's been on the App Store since May 2026, and paying customers use it every day.

PickItUp

Side project, 2026 and ongoing.

On TestFlight.

PickItUp gives you credit for picking up litter. Take a photo of what you grabbed, a small model on your phone says which of eleven kinds of material it is, and the app turns that into a carbon figure credited to you.

I care a lot about that credit being real. If the model isn't confident, the app says nothing rather than guessing, and your photos never leave your phone unless you choose to donate them to research.

Before I trained anything, I wrote down the bar a model has to clear to ship: four tests, all required, run against public litter datasets. The model in the app today is an early generation. I'm training new ones one at a time, and each has to clear all four tests before it takes over. It's a work in progress, and I've written the whole process up. I'm happy to send it to anyone who asks.

Tritech Networking & Solutions

Co-founder and operations lead, since 2020.

Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.

Tritech is the network cabling company I co-founded with my father in 2020, while I was finishing college remotely. We do low-voltage infrastructure: the cabling, racks and connections that make a building's network work. Every project gets its own crew of independent technicians, and I'm the one who finds, vets, trains and manages them.

Our clients have included the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, Honeywell, Waste Management, CyrusOne, Iron Mountain, Hewlett Packard, Refresco and Nutanix.

I scope and price each job, write up what the crew needs to deliver, and check the work against the client's requirements before we sign off. When a job runs over, I'm the one who writes the explanation. I run the back office too, and I still pull cable myself.

Nine months in a neuroscience lab

Shohamy Lab, Zuckerman Institute, Columbia.

Research assistant, May 2019 to February 2020.

For nine months I worked in Daphna Shohamy's lab at Columbia's Zuckerman Institute, which studies how people learn and make decisions. I kept the eye-tracking equipment calibrated and running for several studies at once, recruited and screened participants, and ran their sessions under IRB protocols. My supervisor was Dr. Akram Bakkour.

That's where I learned to write the rules of an experiment down before running it, which is the habit PickItUp is built on.

Columbia, outside the classroom

Omar at graduation in a light-blue Columbia gown, arms out, grinning, cap in one hand. — May 2022, the day I graduated.

Columbia Vegan Society

President, vice president and treasurer, 2018 to 2022.

At Columbia I ran the vegan society for most of my four years. We put on talks and dining-hall campaigns, our bigger events drew more than 200 people, and I managed the budget with the university.

Columbia Effective Altruism

Facilitator and Arete Fellow, 2021 to 2022.

I led a discussion group every two weeks on how to do the most good with what you have. Animal welfare, AI safety, pandemic prevention and climate were the big topics.

Music, as Omar the Seraph

Spotify

Apple Music

I started writing songs and playing guitar when I was 12. My biggest song has passed 1.5 million streams on Spotify, and Symposium, the album I made with the producer VASSI in 2022, is named after Plato's dialogue on love. Have a listen.