Hiring AI agent developers · 10 min read
RAG Developer Hiring Guide
How to hire RAG developers for document search, knowledge assistants, and AI agents grounded in private data.
Short answer
A RAG developer builds systems that retrieve relevant information from private or domain-specific data before an AI model answers. For document-heavy AI agents, this role is often more important than a generic prompt engineer.
Skills to test
- Chunking strategy and document preprocessing.
- Embedding model selection.
- Vector database design with metadata filters.
- Retrieval evaluation and citation quality.
- Permission-aware document access.
- Handling stale, duplicated, or conflicting documents.
Interview questions
- How would you evaluate retrieval quality?
- How do you prevent a model from answering from the wrong document?
- How do you handle private documents with different access levels?
- When would you use LlamaIndex instead of LangChain?
- How would you debug a RAG system that gives plausible but unsupported answers?
Need to plan an AI agent project?
Start with the hiring guide, cost guide, and evaluation checklist before choosing a developer or vendor.