Texas (TX), United States
AI development for Houston teams, on your working day
We build AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia, and we work with Houston teams remotely. There is no Houston 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
- Houston, 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 Houston
6 hours of your day, every working day
Houston 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 Houston buyers usually bring us
The record for Houston lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
energy
Operational data is high volume and low tolerance for a wrong answer, so the eval harness and the fallback behaviour get built before the interface.
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
aerospace
Certification evidence has to trace to a document revision, so retrieval returns the clause and the revision it came from rather than a confident paraphrase.
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.
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 Houston work, you get told that in the first reply rather than after a proposal.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Houston 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
Same treatment, different clocks, and in some cases a different answer.
Start a project
Write down the problem in whatever form you have it. You get a straight answer about scope, timeline and whether this is work we should be doing at all.