England, United Kingdom
AI development for Manchester teams, handed over in writing
The desk is in Vancouver, British Columbia. Manchester 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
- Manchester, United Kingdom
- your clock
- UTC+00:00 (Europe/London)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Manchester
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Manchester is 8 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 17:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 01:00 on the next day. On the same calendar date there is no hour where both sides are at work.
The honest version of this is a selling point. You get a full uninterrupted Vancouver day of work delivered as a written handoff, and we get your review waiting for us in the morning. Two shifts a day, no overtime.
- The Vancouver day ends with a written summary: shipped, broken, blocked, and the one thing we need you to decide.
- That summary is waiting at 01:00 your time, alongside the diffs it refers to.
- The decision log lives in the repository rather than in a chat thread, so it is still readable a year later.
- Anything that would block us gets asked as a proposal you can approve in a sentence, not as an open question.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 09:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Manchester. Neither side takes a bad hour for that one. The call simply lands on two different calendar dates, which is a scheduling detail rather than a hardship.
What Manchester buyers usually bring us
The record for Manchester lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
media
Archives, rights windows and publishing systems are the substrate. A product that respects rights metadata is the one legal will let you launch.
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
advanced manufacturing
Work instructions, tolerance specs and supplier drawings sit in scanned PDFs, so parsing and chunking decide whether a process engineer ever gets an answer back.
Hybrid search beats embeddings alone in nearly every corpus we have opened, and metadata filters behave as hard constraints or they are not filters.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in pounds or US dollars, whichever your accounts payable prefers. UK GDPR applies to whatever we index, so storage region and log retention are agreed in writing before ingestion starts.
The rest is the same everywhere: we scope it, we build a thin slice against your real data, and we hand back something your own team can maintain. No retainer you cannot cancel and no seat licences.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Manchester 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 Kingdom
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.