Catalonia (CT), Spain
AI development for Barcelona teams, handed over in writing
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, with no presence in Barcelona and no shared working hours with it. What that buys you is a full day of build time delivered as a written handoff, waiting when you sit down.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Barcelona, Spain
- your clock
- UTC+01:00 (Europe/Madrid)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Barcelona
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Barcelona is 9 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 18:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 02:00 on the next day. On the same calendar date there is no hour where both sides are at work.
It also produces a better record than a colocated project would. Everything of consequence exists as written text with a date on it, because writing is the only channel available.
- The Vancouver day ends with a written summary: shipped, broken, blocked, and the one thing we need you to decide.
- That summary is waiting at 02:00 your time, alongside the diffs it refers to.
- The decision log lives in the repository rather than in a chat thread, so it is still readable a year later.
- Anything that would block us gets asked as a proposal you can approve in a sentence, not as an open question.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 08:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Barcelona. That hour is outside our working day and inside yours. We take the awkward end of it, because it is our job to be reachable.
What Barcelona buyers usually bring us
The record for Barcelona lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
mobile technology
On-device constraints decide the architecture, so model choice, latency budget and fallback path get settled in week one rather than at launch.
You get a running product with its own test suite and enough documentation for your team to take it over, not a prototype with our commit history in it.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
tourism
Availability, pricing and local knowledge have to come from your systems, because a model that improvises an opening time creates a support ticket.
The interface is the final quarter of the job. Everything before it is the tool layer and the tests that keep the tool layer honest.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in euros. GDPR makes storage location a design question rather than a footnote, so the index, the logs and the model calls get pinned to European regions where your provider offers them, and that is settled in week one.
Everything downstream of that is deliberately unremarkable. Fixed acceptance criteria, weekly shipping, a written decision log, and a first reply that tells you if Barcelona work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Barcelona included. Most engagements are one of them, sometimes two.
- AI products, built end to end
- Knowledge bases and retrieval
- Codebase and team optimization
- Training and enablement
- Forward-deployed engineering
The languages, models and infrastructure underneath all five are listed on the Magic Ship stack page, with what each one is good for and where it is the wrong choice.
Other markets in Europe
Where else the same work happens in Europe, with the numbers redone per market.
Start a project
Say what you are trying to build and what has already been tried. The reply is from a senior engineer, and it will tell you if the shape of the work is wrong before it tells you anything else.