Senior RAG & knowledge systems talent and rates in Government & Public Sector
Senior RAG & knowledge systems engineers serving government & public sector run roughly $150–$215/hr. Stack realities for this combination: Login.gov + Salesforce Gov Cloud + AWS GovCloud + Granicus — common integrations: Login.gov + ID.me identity, Salesforce Government Cloud Plus, AWS GovCloud + Azure Government. Document processing; multilingual chatbots; case-routing
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.