Michigan (MI), United States
AI development for Detroit teams, inside your afternoon
Magic Ship builds AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia. There is no office in Detroit, no local staff, and no local phone number. There is a 5-hour window each working day where decisions get made live, and a written record for the rest.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Detroit, United States
- your clock
- UTC-05:00 (America/Detroit)
- overlap
- 5 hours a day, 09:00-14:00 in Vancouver
- presence
- remote only, no office in Detroit
What fits in a 5-hour window
The overlap is real and it is bounded. Detroit sits 3 hours ahead of Vancouver, so the shared part of the day runs 09:00 to 14:00 our time and 12:00 to 17:00 yours.
Use it for decisions, not status. Status is a document you can read at your own hour; a decision is the thing worth spending a live hour on, and there are only a few of those a week.
What moves to writing is not a downgrade. A daily handoff note at the end of the Vancouver day, decisions logged when they are made, and review on the pull request itself means your morning starts with the answer rather than with a meeting invitation.
What Detroit buyers usually bring us
The record for Detroit lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
automotive
Supplier portals, warranty systems and dealer software rarely offer a clean API, so integrations either get validated against real traffic or they are decoration.
Integrations are validated against live traffic: auth, pagination, rate limits, retries, and the failure modes that only surface under real load.
Closest service line: Forward-deployed engineering
manufacturing
Procedures, drawings and shift reports hold the answers. Getting them out is an ingestion problem far more often than it is a model problem.
Chunking follows the structure of the document instead of a character count, which is the whole difference between a useful index and an expensive one.
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.
Everything downstream of that is deliberately unremarkable. Fixed acceptance criteria, weekly shipping, a written decision log, and a first reply that tells you if Detroit work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Detroit 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
Where else the same work happens in United States, with the numbers redone per market.
Start a project
Tell us what you are trying to build. A senior engineer reads every message and answers on scope, timeline and fit. If your problem is not one we should take, that is the first thing you will hear.