Gauteng (GP), South Africa
AI development for Johannesburg teams, handed over in writing
We build AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia, and we work with Johannesburg 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
- Johannesburg, South Africa
- your clock
- UTC+02:00 (Africa/Johannesburg)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Johannesburg
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Johannesburg is 10 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 19:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 03:00 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.
- A handoff note goes out at the end of every Vancouver working day: what shipped, what broke, and what needs a decision from you.
- You read it at 03:00, or whenever your day starts, and review the pull requests it points at.
- Decisions are logged as they are made, in the repository, so neither side has to reconstruct why something was done.
- A blocking question arrives with a proposed answer attached, so the default outcome is progress rather than a stalled day.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 07:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Johannesburg. 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 Johannesburg buyers usually bring us
The record for Johannesburg lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
mining
Geological reports, drill data and plant telemetry describe the same orebody in three formats, and the product is what makes them agree.
The eval harness gets built beside the first feature, so week three can prove that week two did not quietly make the output worse.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
financial services
Research, filings and internal policy are the corpus. Hybrid search with metadata filters as hard constraints, plus span citations, or it does not ship.
The golden-question set is the deliverable nobody thinks to ask for, and it is the only way to show that a change helped.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. Payments from South Africa carry their own banking steps, so invoice timing is agreed at the start rather than chased at month end.
Everything else is the same as it would be for a client down the street from us: scope, a thin slice in week one, then weekly increments you can stop at any time. The distance changes the schedule, not the contract.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Johannesburg 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 Africa
Each one has its own page, its own overlap arithmetic and its own industries.
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.