Berlin (BE), Germany
AI development for Berlin teams, handed over in writing
We build AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia, and we work with Berlin teams without a single shared working hour. No office there, no staff there. What replaces the shared day is a written handoff, decisions logged as they are made, and review that happens on your morning rather than in a call.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Berlin, Germany
- your clock
- UTC+01:00 (Europe/Berlin)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Berlin
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Berlin 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.
That is not an apology. A loop that turns once every twenty-four hours, in writing, is a faster way to build software than a calendar full of half-attended calls, and it forces the decisions into a form somebody can read six months later.
- Everything built during our day lands in one written note before we close the laptop. No status meeting stands in for it.
- Your morning starts with that note and a set of pull requests to review, which is a better start than a calendar invitation.
- Every decision worth arguing about is written down where the code is, with the reasoning and the date attached.
- Questions come with a recommendation, because a question that needs a reply before work continues costs a full day here.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 08:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Berlin. 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 Berlin buyers usually bring us
The record for Berlin lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
software startups
The first production surface matters more than the roadmap. A thin end-to-end slice in week one tells you what the rest is going to cost.
Week one puts something running in your environment against real state, because an agent that can only talk teaches nobody anything about the hard part.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
creative industries
Studios adopt tools faster than practice. Hands-on sessions on live projects produce a written practice the studio keeps after we leave.
People ship real changes during the session, which is the only version of this that changes behaviour once we leave.
Closest service line: Training and enablement
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. German buyers usually want that in the statement of work, and it belongs there.
Beyond that, the shape of an engagement does not change with distance: a scoping call, a thin end-to-end slice, then weekly increments against acceptance criteria fixed in advance. If we are not the right shop for Berlin work, you get told that in the first reply rather than after a proposal.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Berlin 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 Germany
Same treatment, different clocks, and in some cases a different answer.
Start a project
Send the problem. If it is a fit, you get scope and a timeline. If it is not, you get told that in the first reply instead of after a discovery process.