South Holland (ZH), Netherlands
AI development for Rotterdam teams, handed over in writing
The desk is in Vancouver, British Columbia. Rotterdam 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
- Rotterdam, Netherlands
- your clock
- UTC+01:00 (Europe/Amsterdam)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Rotterdam
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Rotterdam is 9 hours ahead of Vancouver. When we start at 09:00 it is 18:00 on the same day for you, and when we stop at 17:00 it is 02:00 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.
- 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: 08:00 in Vancouver is 17:00 in Rotterdam. 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 Rotterdam buyers usually bring us
The record for Rotterdam lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
shipping
Vessel systems, port calls and documentation flows each need their own integration, built against live data and real timeouts.
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
energy trading
Curves, contracts and outage notices move together. A tool layer that reads all three and shows its inputs is worth more than a summarizer.
Week one puts something running in your environment against real state, because an agent that can only talk teaches nobody anything about the hard part.
Closest service line: AI products, built end to end
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in euros. GDPR makes storage location a design question rather than a footnote, so the index, the logs and the model calls get pinned to European regions where your provider offers them, and that is settled in week one.
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, Rotterdam 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 Europe
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.