Nairobi, Kenya
AI development for Nairobi teams, handed over in writing
We build AI products from Vancouver, British Columbia, and we work with Nairobi 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
- Nairobi, Kenya
- your clock
- UTC+03:00 (Africa/Nairobi)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Nairobi
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Nairobi is 11 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 20:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 04:00 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.
- Everything built during our day lands in one written note before we close the laptop. No status meeting stands in for it.
- Your morning starts with that note and a set of pull requests to review, which is a better start than a calendar invitation.
- Every decision worth arguing about is written down where the code is, with the reasoning and the date attached.
- Questions come with a recommendation, because a question that needs a reply before work continues costs a full day here.
One live call a week, and it is scheduled honestly: 06:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Nairobi. 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 Nairobi buyers usually bring us
The record for Nairobi lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
mobile money
Agent networks, ledgers and telco rails all need integrating with real retry and reconciliation behaviour, which no prompt has ever described correctly.
Reconciliation and idempotency are designed in at the start, because retrofitting them after the first duplicate transaction is expensive.
Closest service line: Forward-deployed engineering
logistics
Carrier APIs, warehouse systems and customer portals all break differently under load, which is why the integration work is the project.
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
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. Contracts are in English and the engagement is fully remote, with delivery measured in shipped increments rather than hours logged.
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, Nairobi 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.