Northern Ireland, United Kingdom
AI development for Belfast teams, handed over in writing
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia. Belfast and Vancouver share no working hours at all, and that is stated up front because it changes how the work runs: written handoff at the end of each side's day, a loop that turns once every twenty-four hours, and nobody waiting on a meeting.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Belfast, United Kingdom
- your clock
- UTC+00:00 (Europe/London)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Belfast
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Belfast is 8 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 17:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 01:00 on the next day. On the same calendar date there is no hour where both sides are at work.
Removing the shared hour removes the interruptions with it. A full Vancouver day of uninterrupted build time, handed over in writing, tends to move a project further than a day punctuated by four calls.
- 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 01:00 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: 09:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Belfast. Neither side takes a bad hour for that one. The call simply lands on two different calendar dates, which is a scheduling detail rather than a hardship.
What Belfast buyers usually bring us
The record for Belfast lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
cybersecurity
Security teams want agent output they can review line by line, which means small diffs, checks the agent runs itself, and rules scoped per path.
The deliverable is committed to your repository. Context files, path-scoped rules, and checks an agent can run against its own output.
Closest service line: Codebase and team optimization
financial technology
Core systems, ledgers and payment rails each carry their own auth, pagination and rate limits, and none of it survives being described in a prompt.
Every integration ships with its failure path written down: what retries, what alerts, and what a human is expected to look at.
Closest service line: Forward-deployed engineering
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in pounds or US dollars, whichever your accounts payable prefers. UK GDPR applies to whatever we index, so storage region and log retention are agreed in writing before ingestion starts.
Everything downstream of that is deliberately unremarkable. Fixed acceptance criteria, weekly shipping, a written decision log, and a first reply that tells you if Belfast work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Belfast 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 United Kingdom
More entries from the United Kingdom list, each written the same way as this one.
Start a project
Describe what is broken or what you want built. The reply comes from the engineer who would build it, and it covers scope, timeline and fit before anything else.