Hi! I'm Omar. Nice to meet you.

I grew up in Queens, NYC and currently live in Tucson , saguaro country. I work across IT operations, project management and people management at a small IT company I co-founded with my dad. This year I built an iOS operations platform that small businesses find useful enough to pay for. Right now I'm looking for my next job, in AI safety, animal welfare, or preferably both.

Email me My CV

The sky over Tucson right now. NASA's Deep Star Map, turned to this minute.

What I'm doing now

Open to relocating anywhere on Earth.

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

What Kitt Peak's camera sees right now

The latest image from the all-sky camera at Kitt Peak National Observatory, west of Tucson. — Kitt Peak National Observatory, 55 miles west of me. The sky behind my name is the same sky on a perfect night. Camera image: NSF NOIRLab, CC BY 4.0.

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 a year 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.

I've been vegan since 2015, ran the vegan society at Columbia for four years, and facilitated Effective Altruism there. I didn't arrive at these questions this year.

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

The Tower of Babel under construction, with masons, hoists and scaffolds, from the Bedford Hours. — A building site in the 1420s, from the Bedford Hours. Somebody had to schedule that crew too. Coordinex is the place I built to do it.

At Tritech, logistics were messy for years. Schedules were often created at the last minute, employee hours were often tracked incorrectly, and we'd find out about staffing issues when someone didn't show up to the job site. We had no single place that showed who was working where, when, and in what capacity. So I built one.

Coordinex is an iPhone app for small businesses with many moving parts. The core is scheduling, time tracking and payroll. Expenses, inventory, approvals, documents, messaging and reports can then be linked to those core features, 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 tools (Claude Code, Codex and OpenClaw, mainly) to write the code. There's an on-device AI assistant built in, too. A manager can ask it to plan next week's schedule from live sales data (via our Square integration), 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 started on walks. I'd go out at golden hour with a Trader Joe's bag and a trash grabber, and I noticed that cleaning up my own neighborhood was oddly addictive, the same small pull as scrolling, a little hit every time I spotted something and got it. Except I came home with a full bag and a cleaner street. I wanted to build the thing that turns that pull into a game.

I also wanted the numbers to mean something. Every piece of litter is carbon that was spent to make it, and if enough people in enough cities logged what they picked up, researchers could get a concrete measure of the carbon sitting in a city's litter. My hope is that picking up becomes a thing people go out and do together, and stays scientifically useful at the same time.

So: 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.

I trained it on public litter datasets, and before I trained anything I wrote down the bar a model has to clear to ship: four tests against those datasets, all required. 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.

Dietrich the wire-drawer at work in a swing seat, with coils of wire on the floor, painted in Nuremberg around 1425. — Dietrich, wire-drawer, Nuremberg, about 1425. The city painted every tradesman who retired into its almshouse, at his bench. He pulled wire for a living. So do I.

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.

A year in a neuroscience lab

Shohamy Lab, Zuckerman Institute, Columbia.

Research assistant, May 2019 to May 2020.

A diagram of the eye in red and black ink, from a manuscript of Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Ten Treatises on the Eye. — The eye, from a manuscript of Hunayn ibn Ishaq's Ten Treatises on the Eye, written in the 800s. I spent a year tracking real ones.

For a year 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.

Four years at Columbia

Butler Library at Columbia, seen across the lawn. — Butler Library. The names across its front, Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero and Vergil, are most of the Core's first year.

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

Columbia College, class of 2022

Psychology, with a concentration in philosophy. Core Scholar.

Every Columbia undergraduate spends two years on the Core: Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Austen, Woolf, Du Bois, and a few dozen others, read whole and argued over in seminars of about twenty. I loved it enough to add a philosophy concentration to my psychology degree, and the College named me a Core Scholar, its award for a creative reflection on those books.

Columbia Vegan Society

President, vice president and treasurer, 2018 to 2022.

Saint Francis preaching to a flock of birds under a tree, from Giotto's Louvre panel. — Francis preaching to the birds, from the same Giotto as the seraph below. We booked Earthling Ed.

At Columbia I ran the vegan society for most of my four years. We brought speakers to campus, Earthling Ed and Joey Carbstrong among them, ran dining-hall campaigns, and our bigger events drew more than 200 people. 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

The Spectator's piece on us, April 2022

A six-winged seraph on a gold ground, painted by Giotto around 1297. — A seraph, by Giotto, about 1297, in the Louvre. Six wings. I took the name.

A seraph, by Giotto, about 1297, in the Louvre. Six wings. I took the name.

Two musicians playing early guitars, from the Cantigas de Santa Maria. — The first guitars anyone painted, in the Cantigas de Santa Maria, about 1280. I picked one up at 12.

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. When it came out, the Columbia Spectator sat down with VASSI and me to ask what we were trying to do with it. The answer was in the headline: spread love and share hope. Have a listen.

The opening of the Symposium in the Clarke Plato, a Greek manuscript written in 895. — Where Symposium begins, in the oldest surviving manuscript of Plato's dialogues, written in 895.

Skip the player

If the player doesn't load, open Omar the Seraph on Spotify.

Plato's Symposium painted by Anselm Feuerbach: a drunken Alcibiades arrives with torch-bearers at the left while Socrates and the guests recline at the right. — Plato's Symposium, as Anselm Feuerbach painted it in 1869: Alcibiades arriving drunk on the left, Socrates still talking on the right. My album is named after the dialogue.

Fun facts

I'd been to 50 countries before I turned 18. They're all lit on the globe below. Ask me about any of them.

Detail of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a medieval map of the world — The world, as drawn in Hereford around 1300.

I'm fluent in Swedish. French gets me through a dinner. Spanish is a work in progress.

The Rök runestone, its face covered in carved runes — The Rök runestone, Östergötland, Sweden.

Vegan since 2015. I ran the Columbia Vegan Society for most of college.

A cabbage harvest, painted in a 14th-century health handbook — Cabbage harvest, from a 14th-century health handbook.

Where I've been

Bahamas, Belgium, Belize, Cambodia, Canada, Chile, China, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Greece, Guatemala, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Kenya, Laos, Mexico, Morocco, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Puerto Rico, Senegal, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, Turkey, the United Kingdom, the United States, Vietnam, and a handful of Caribbean islands too small for the map.

Every country I've set foot in. Most of them before I was 18; the rest I'm working on.

Say hello

The steamship Great Eastern laying the Atlantic telegraph cable under storm clouds, painted by Henry Clifford in 1865. — The Great Eastern laying the first working Atlantic cable, 1866. It took two summers and one snapped line. I pull cable for a living, so I keep this one close.

The next thing I want to work on is the gap between talking about doing good and doing it, in AI safety or animal welfare, with people who'll argue with me and then build.

Email is the quickest way to reach me, and I answer.

oan2102@columbia.edu

My CV, one page per side, October 2026

I'm also on LinkedIn.