Let us consider a 1.4 solar mass neutron star, which, if not spinning would have a radius of about 10km. Ignoring relativistic corrections (which will be significant) the angular velocity $\omega$ of a circular orbit just above that surface is given by $$r\omega^2 = GM/r^2$$ so $$\omega = \sqrt{\frac{GM}{r^3}}$$ and putting in values, we find $\omega = 13.6 kHz$, so that the period $2\pi/\omega$ is about 460 microseconds. So for our "life" to experience moderate gravity, the neutron star will need to be spinning at something like 2000 rotations/second, or about 30% of lightspeed at the surface.
Of course that makes the rather large assumption that a spinning neutron star would still be spherical, which is most certainly would not. Working out exactly what shape and density distribution it would adopt is probably rather hard. I suspect you'd need to know a lot about the equation of state (density-pressure relationship) of nuclear matter. I speculate that you'd end up with a somewhat oblate neutron star with an much thicker crust of "normal" nuclear matter at the equator, the very top of which would be almot in orbit. A little like Mesklin on steroids. I also suspect the whole thing might be quite unstable, since if a chunk of the equatorial belt rose up some reason, it would experience less gravity and so less pressure and so expand, causing at least parts of it to stick up further and be spun off into orbit. Conversely, if it dropped a little, it would become denser and drop further.
Assuming some freak of nature or alien technology kept it stable, and plucking a figure from the air, suppose the equatorial diameter of the discus shaped star was 50km, so that the surface at the equator was essentially in a 25km radius circular orbit the period would need to be about 2ms. We can calculate the tidal forces experienced by an object on the equator using a formula from Wikipedia
The tidal acceleration in $g$'s per meter is $$2GM/gr^3 = 2.4 \times 10^6 g/m$$ That is two objects 1m apart would "fall away" from one another with an acceleration of 2.4 million gravities, so any life there would need to be very small and very tough.