Senior RAG & knowledge systems talent and rates in Crypto & Web3
Senior RAG & knowledge systems engineers serving crypto & web3 run roughly $150–$215/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Fireblocks/BitGo MPC custody; Circle USDC issuance; Chainalysis + TRM Labs screening; Alchemy/Infura RPC; The Graph indexers — common integrations: Fireblocks / BitGo / Anchorage MPC custody, Circle USDC + Tether USDT issuance APIs, Chainalysis + TRM Labs + Elliptic compliance. Wallet-clustering ML + sanctions-list embedding match + anomaly detection on transaction velocity
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.