Lagos (LA), Nigeria
AI development for Lagos teams, handed over in writing
The desk is in Vancouver, British Columbia. Lagos is far enough around the world that our working days do not touch on the same date, which is a fact worth stating in the first paragraph rather than discovering in week two. The work is handed over in writing instead.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Lagos, Nigeria
- your clock
- UTC+01:00 (Africa/Lagos)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Lagos
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Lagos 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.
- 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 02:00, 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: 08:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Lagos. 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 Lagos buyers usually bring us
The record for Lagos lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
financial technology
Core systems, ledgers and payment rails each carry their own auth, pagination and rate limits, and none of it survives being described in a prompt.
We work embedded with your team, or with your customer teams, and the unit of delivery is a deployment rather than a document.
Closest service line: Forward-deployed engineering
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 first slice is thin and runs end to end: one real workflow, one real data source, and an agent with tools that change something rather than describe it.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. Contracts are in English, and payment timing is agreed in the statement of work because it is the thing that slips.
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, Lagos 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
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.