Hiring a RAG Developer: What to Look For and How to Screen

Retrieval-augmented generation — RAG — is the technique behind most "chat with your documents" tools. Instead of relying only on what an AI model already knows, the system first searches your own content (manuals, policies, product data) and then asks the model to answer using what it found. It is one of the most practical ways for businesses to use AI today.

What a RAG project involves

1. Ingestion: collecting documents from drives, websites, help desks and databases.
2. Chunking & embedding: splitting content into pieces and turning them into searchable vectors.
3. Retrieval: finding the most relevant pieces for each question.
4. Generation: prompting the model to answer with citations.
5. Evaluation: testing answer quality and fixing gaps.
6. Integration: putting the assistant inside your website, app, Slack or help desk.

Skills that matter most

• Strong Python (or Node.js) and API development
• Experience with vector databases and search
• Document processing: PDFs, HTML, spreadsheets
• Prompt design and output evaluation
• Security: access control so users only see what they are allowed to see
• Normal software skills — testing, deployment, monitoring

Screening questions that reveal real experience

• "How would you decide how to split our documents into chunks?"
• "What would you do if the assistant gives confident but wrong answers?"
• "How would you measure answer quality before launch?"
• "How do you make sure staff only get answers from documents they can access?"
• "How would you keep the knowledge base up to date?"

Strong candidates talk about evaluation, citations and access control — not just which model to use.

A practical test task

Give candidates 20–30 of your real documents and 10 questions with expected answers. Ask for a small working prototype and a short note on how they would improve it. This shows practical skill far better than a quiz.

Where to find RAG developers

Want an assistant that answers from your own content? Hire a Python developer or tell us about your documents and users.