Iowa (IA), United States
AI development for Des Moines teams, on your working day
We build AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia, and we work with Des Moines teams remotely. There is no Des Moines office and there never has been. The reason the arrangement works anyway is arithmetic: 6 shared hours a day is most of a working day.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Des Moines, United States
- your clock
- UTC-06:00 (America/Chicago)
- overlap
- 6 hours a day, 09:00-15:00 in Vancouver
- presence
- remote only, no office in Des Moines
6 hours of your day, every working day
Des Moines runs 2 hours ahead of Vancouver. On a normal working day the two calendars overlap from 09:00 to 15:00 Vancouver time, which is 11:00 to 17:00 where you are.
It also means demos happen live rather than as a recording. Watching somebody use what we built, while we can still change it that day, is worth more than any written status report.
The parts that still get written down are written down anyway: acceptance criteria, the decision log, and what changed in each weekly increment. A shared clock is not an excuse for an undocumented project.
What Des Moines buyers usually bring us
The record for Des Moines lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
insurance
Policy wordings, endorsements and claims files need clause-level retrieval with the version and jurisdiction pinned, or the answer is guesswork with a citation.
Most retrieval failures are ingestion failures, so the early weeks go into parsing and chunking rather than into rewording a prompt.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
agriculture
Agronomy notes pile up season by season in spreadsheets and inboxes. Indexed by crop, plot and year they answer questions; left alone they are archaeology.
It starts with your documents and your own analysts writing the questions the system has to get right before anyone will trust it.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. A US buyer engaging a Canadian company is routine, and the form your accounts team will ask for is a W-8BEN-E, which we have ready before the first invoice.
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 Des Moines work, you get told that in the first reply rather than after a proposal.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Des Moines 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 States
More of United States, all of it worked remotely from Vancouver.
Start a project
Send the problem rather than a job spec. You get an answer on scope, timeline and whether we are the right shop, written by the person who would do the work.