Senior RAG & knowledge systems talent and rates in Education
Senior RAG & knowledge systems engineers serving education run roughly $150–$215/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Canvas/Blackboard LMS + Clever rostering + LTI 1.3 + OneRoster + Stripe ACH — common integrations: Canvas / Blackboard / D2L LMS, PowerSchool / Infinite Campus SIS, Clever / ClassLink rostering. Student work + learning-outcome telemetry + IEP/504 records (FERPA + state law) — strict opt-in for AI training
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.