Senior RAG & knowledge systems talent and rates in Accounting & CPA Firms
Senior RAG & knowledge systems engineers serving accounting & cpa firms run roughly $150–$215/hr. Stack realities for this combination: QBO/Xero + Drake/Lacerte + Karbon + DocuSign — common integrations: QuickBooks Online + Xero + Sage Intacct, Drake + Lacerte + ProConnect tax, Karbon + Canopy practice management. Receipt classification; tax-research RAG; anomaly detection in client books
What RAG & knowledge systems actually requires in 2026
2026 RAG: pgvector + Postgres for sub-10M docs, Pinecone or Weaviate for >10M, Cohere/Voyage AI/OpenAI for embeddings, Cohere Rerank or BGE for re-ranking, LlamaIndex or LangChain for orchestration, RAGAS or TruLens for evals. Self-hosted: vLLM + LiteLLM proxy. A real RAG engineer can debug a "the model said X" failure to a chunk-retrieval miss vs an embedding-similarity error vs a prompt-template bug. They run evals before every change. RAG without evals is hope-driven engineering — and hope doesn't scale past beta users.