Engineering-First Advisory
NexLayer Advisory was founded to bridge the gap between high-level management consulting and hands-on systems engineering. We don't just produce slide decks; we help your team design, prototype, and build the systems that carry your enterprise forward.
Our background stems from highly complex and regulated environments—handling payment integrations at Visa, building open banking solutions at Tink, and migrating legacy architectures to cloud-native foundations across fintech, retail, and manufacturing sectors.
Our Core Values
These values define how we work, how we advise our clients, and how we measure success.
Absolute Integrity
We give transparent, honest feedback on your architecture and timelines. If a plan is high-risk or redundant, we'll tell you immediately and propose alternative strategies.
Pragmatic Modernization
We don't rewrite codebases just for the sake of newer technologies. We focus on incremental changes that deliver real business impact, stability, and security.
Empowered Teams
We don't leave you dependent on our services. We work closely with your internal teams, mentoring them on SRE practices and modern cloud patterns so they are fully empowered to maintain the systems.
Meet the Team
Neil Thirsk
Founder & CEONeil Thirsk is the Founder & CEO of NexLayer Advisory, bringing 20+ years of technology leadership experience in platform engineering, infrastructure, and software delivery within highly regulated FinTech and payments environments.
Most recently, Neil served as Sr. Director for Infrastructure & Tooling at Tink (a Visa Company), where he improved platform availability from 99.0% to 99.99% for Tink's Open Banking's authorization and identity platform while leading its cloud modernization strategy. Prior to that, he was Sr. Director of M&A Technology Integration at Visa Europe, serving as Executive Sponsor for $2B+ in technology integration across six acquisitions. He also held Sr. Director roles in Platform Engineering at Visa Europe and Visa Inc., leading globally distributed engineering teams and enabling strategic payment network launches.
Neil graduated from the University of Washington.
Chelsea Wei
CFOChelsea Wei serves as the CFO at NexLayer Advisory. With extensive experience in financial management and strategic leadership.
Chelsea Wei currently serves as the CFO for OSS Capital. Chelsea held senior financial positions across several prominent organizations. She served as Financial Controller at Felix Capital, where she managed financial operations for the London-based venture capital firm. Before that, she was Controller at Frazier Healthcare Partners, overseeing funds’ operations and financial strategies for healthcare investments. Chelsea also gained valuable experience as an Auditor at PwC and held fund accounting leadership roles at Freestone Capital Management and UMB Bank.
Chelsea is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and has passed Level I of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) program. She graduated from Utah State University. She is fluent in English and Chinese.