Shanghai, China
AI development for Shanghai teams, handed over in writing
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia. Shanghai and Vancouver share no working hours at all, and that is stated up front because it changes how the work runs: written handoff at the end of each side's day, a loop that turns once every twenty-four hours, and nobody waiting on a meeting.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Shanghai, China
- your clock
- UTC+08:00 (Asia/Shanghai)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Shanghai
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Shanghai 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.
Treated properly it is the better arrangement. Nobody blocks on a meeting, every decision exists as text with a date on it, and the work moves while the other side sleeps instead of while the other side waits.
- 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 Shanghai 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 Shanghai buyers usually bring us
The record for Shanghai lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
manufacturing
Procedures, drawings and shift reports hold the answers. Getting them out is an ingestion problem far more often than it is a model problem.
It starts with your documents and your own analysts writing the questions the system has to get right before anyone will trust it.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
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.
Most retrieval failures are ingestion failures, so the early weeks go into parsing and chunking rather than into rewording a prompt.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in US dollars. Cross-border data rules are strict, so the practical shape is a system that runs inside your own cloud account and stays there.
Past that, the mechanics are ordinary. A scoping call, a written scope, weekly increments, and an invoice that matches what shipped. The one thing distance changes is when in your day the questions arrive.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Shanghai 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
If you are comparing markets, these are the other Asia entries in the record set.
Start a project
Describe what is broken or what you want built. The reply comes from the engineer who would build it, and it covers scope, timeline and fit before anything else.