Since it’s not super obvious when you first research it, I made video/howto on how to concurrently run Infrared and Neopixels on arduino-like chips (AVR, Teensy v3.1, ESP8266, and ESP32):
The whole story may be longer than what you care for, so I have a summary page here: http://marc.merlins.org/perso/arduino/post_2017-04-03_Arduino-328P-Uno-Teensy3_1-ESP8266-ESP32-IR-and-Neopixels.html
and the code is there: https://github.com/marcmerlin/Neopixel-IR/blob/master/README.md
Basically you need to be careful of interrupts being turned off by some neopixel libraries, which in turn breaks IR reception, and even FastLED on ESP8266 turns interrupts off too long, but there is another lib based on I2S that works great for that chip.