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SmartyDevs
AI & ML · 02

Retrieval-augmented knowledge systems.

RAG pipelines from ingestion through retrieval, ranking, eval and observability. Grounded answers, controllable behaviour, costs that make sense — at the scale of your real document corpus.

§ 01The problem

The problem we solve

RAG looks like five lines of LangChain in a tutorial. In production it's an engineering discipline: ingesting messy documents reliably, chunking sensibly, retrieving with the right hybrid strategy, ranking properly, evaluating against a real dataset, and watching it drift as your corpus grows. We've shipped enough of these to know which decisions matter and which are noise.

§ 02Capabilities

What we ship

  • 01Document ingestion pipelines for PDFs, HTML, Notion, Confluence, S3, etc.
  • 02Chunking strategies tuned for your content shape
  • 03Embeddings model selection on your eval set, not benchmarks
  • 04Hybrid retrieval: vector + lexical + metadata filters
  • 05Re-ranking with cross-encoders or LLM rerankers
  • 06Retrieval evaluation: nDCG, recall@k, against a labelled set
  • 07Grounded generation with citations and confidence
  • 08Per-tenant isolation in multi-tenant RAG systems
  • 09Incremental indexing as your corpus changes
  • 10Cost and latency dashboards across the pipeline
§ 03Deliverables

What you receive

  • Production RAG system with documented invariants
  • Eval dataset for retrieval and generation quality
  • Re-indexing and re-evaluation runbook
  • Observability dashboards for retrieval and generation
§ 04Stack

Stack we reach for

Postgres + pgvector
Qdrant · Weaviate · Pinecone
Elasticsearch · Typesense
Voyage · OpenAI embeddings
Cohere reranker
LlamaIndex
LangChain · LangGraph
Ragas · TruLens
Langfuse
§ 05Ideal for

Ideal for

  • Companies drowning in unstructured documents users need to query
  • Customer support teams who want answers grounded in product docs
  • Internal knowledge tools where general LLMs hallucinate badly
  • Legal, medical, financial domains demanding citations and provenance
§ 06Process

How an engagement runs

  1. 01

    Eval first

    We build an evaluation set from real queries and real expected answers before touching the model. Without it, every change is opinion.

  2. 02

    Ingestion & retrieval

    Document pipeline, chunking and retrieval tuned against the eval. Hybrid strategies tested, not assumed.

  3. 03

    Generation

    Grounded generation with citations, structured output where appropriate, fallback behaviour for low-confidence cases.

  4. 04

    Operate

    Observability, drift monitoring, re-indexing automation, per-query cost tracking.

§ 07Engagement

How to engage

01

RAG Feasibility

1 — 2 weeks

Document audit, eval set construction, prototype on your real corpus.

02

RAG Build

6 — 14 weeks

End-to-end RAG system production-ready, with evals and operational maturity.

03

RAG Operate

Ongoing

Continuous tuning as your corpus and use cases evolve.

§ 08Common questions

Frequently asked.

01Why not just fine-tune?

Fine-tuning is rarely the right answer for fact retrieval — it makes models know about your data, not look it up. RAG keeps citations possible, updates trivial and costs sane. We use fine-tuning where style or domain language matters.

02Which vector database?

Postgres + pgvector unless your scale or feature set forces something more specialized. Most teams never need a dedicated vector DB and pay heavily for the complexity.

03How do you measure quality?

A labelled eval set built from real user queries. Retrieval metrics (recall, nDCG), answer quality with LLM-as-judge for scale plus human review on a sample.

Have a problem worth solving well?

Tell us the outcome you want. We'll tell you what it takes — honestly, within a week, in writing.

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