Zurich (ZH), Switzerland
AI development for Zurich teams, handed over in writing
Magic Ship is an AI development agency in Vancouver, British Columbia, with no presence in Zurich and no shared working hours with it. What that buys you is a full day of build time delivered as a written handoff, waiting when you sit down.
- base
- vancouver, bc, canada (UTC-08:00)
- market
- Zurich, Switzerland
- your clock
- UTC+01:00 (Europe/Zurich)
- overlap
- none on the same date, written handoff instead
- presence
- remote only, no office in Zurich
No shared working day, so the loop is written
Zurich 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.
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.
- 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 Zurich. 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 Zurich buyers usually bring us
The record for Zurich lists two industries. Here is the part of each one that turns into an engagement, and the service line it lands under.
banking
Policy documents, product terms and audit trails are the corpus, and an answer without a citation to the governing clause is worse than no answer at all.
Recall gets measured before anybody comments on the wording, because a fluent answer drawn from the wrong passage is the worst outcome on offer.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
insurance
Policy wordings, endorsements and claims files need clause-level retrieval with the version and jurisdiction pinned, or the answer is guesswork with a citation.
Chunking follows the structure of the document instead of a character count, which is the whole difference between a useful index and an expensive one.
Closest service line: Knowledge bases and retrieval
Contracts, currency and where the data sits
Invoices are in Swiss francs or US dollars. Swiss buyers almost always specify where data may sit, and that constraint shapes the architecture rather than being bolted on at the end.
Everything downstream of that is deliberately unremarkable. Fixed acceptance criteria, weekly shipping, a written decision log, and a first reply that tells you if Zurich work of this shape is not something we should take.
The five lines we sell
Same five lines everywhere, Zurich 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
Where else the same work happens in Europe, with the numbers redone per market.
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.