Pennsylvania (PA), United States
AI development for Philadelphia teams, inside your afternoon
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia. Between here and Philadelphia there are 5 shared working hours a day. The engagement is designed against that number rather than against an assumption that everyone is online together.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Philadelphia, United States
- your clock
- UTC-05:00 (America/New_York)
- overlap
- 5 hours a day, 09:00-14:00 in Vancouver
- presence
- remote only, no office in Philadelphia
What fits in a 5-hour window
The overlap is real and it is bounded. Philadelphia sits 3 hours ahead of Vancouver, so the shared part of the day runs 09:00 to 14:00 our time and 12:00 to 17:00 yours.
Inside it: the standup, the demo, and any decision that needs two people to agree in real time. Outside it: the build, the review comments, and the written answer to the question you asked at the top of your day.
What moves to writing is not a downgrade. A daily handoff note at the end of the Vancouver day, decisions logged when they are made, and review on the pull request itself means your morning starts with the answer rather than with a meeting invitation.
What Philadelphia buyers usually bring us
The record for Philadelphia lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
pharmaceuticals
Regulatory documents and study reports have strict structure and strict traceability, so parsing that structure is the bulk of the schedule.
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
higher education
Faculty and staff need the failure modes as much as the workflows, so sessions run on their own courses and repos and end with a written practice they keep.
The measure is what the team does two months later, not the feedback form at the end of the afternoon.
Closest service line: Training and enablement
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. A US buyer engaging a Canadian company is routine, and the form your accounts team will ask for is a W-8BEN-E, which we have ready before the first invoice.
Everything downstream of that is deliberately unremarkable. Fixed acceptance criteria, weekly shipping, a written decision log, and a first reply that tells you if Philadelphia work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Philadelphia 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 States
If you are comparing markets, these are the other United States entries in the record set.
Start a project
Say what you are trying to build and what has already been tried. The reply is from a senior engineer, and it will tell you if the shape of the work is wrong before it tells you anything else.