Metro Manila, Philippines
AI development for Manila teams, handed over in writing
The desk is in Vancouver, British Columbia. Manila 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
- Manila, Philippines
- your clock
- UTC+08:00 (Asia/Manila)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Manila
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Manila is 16 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 01:00 on the next day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 09:00 on the next day. On the same calendar date there is no hour where both sides are at work.
There is a real cost and it is worth naming: an answer to a blocking question can take a working day to reach you. We handle it by sending the proposed answer with the question, so silence means agreement rather than a lost day.
- 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 09:00, 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: 17:00 in Vancouver is 09:00 in Manila on the next day. 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 Manila buyers usually bring us
The record for Manila lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
business process outsourcing
Delivery teams get handed AI tooling and no practice. Sessions on real tickets, in the client stack, are what makes the tooling stick past the pilot.
People ship real changes during the session, which is the only version of this that changes behaviour once we leave.
Closest service line: Training and enablement
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.
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. English contracting is standard, and the working relationship runs on written decisions rather than on calls.
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, Manila 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 Asia
More of Asia, all of it worked remotely from Vancouver.
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.