New York (NY), United States
AI development for Rochester teams, inside your afternoon
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, working remotely with teams in Rochester. We are not in Rochester and we will not pretend to be. Your day and ours meet for 5 hours, and the engagement is built around that window rather than around wishing it were longer.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Rochester, 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 Rochester
What fits in a 5-hour window
The overlap is real and it is bounded. Rochester 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.
The window is best spent where being live actually helps: a design argument, an eval review, a scope cut. Progress reporting is a document, and a document does not need both of us awake.
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 Rochester buyers usually bring us
The record for Rochester lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
optics
Measurement data and tolerance analysis want a tool layer over the instrument output, with evals written against parts you already measured.
You get a running product with its own test suite and enough documentation for your team to take it over, not a prototype with our commit history in it.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
imaging
Image pipelines need measurable output, so the eval harness and the labelled set come before the interface, not after the first demo.
We ship something narrow early and widen it, because scope found in production costs less than scope argued about in a document.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
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 Rochester work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Rochester 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
More entries from the United States list, each written the same way as this one.
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.