Hire a RAG developer who ships real-world retrieval, not demos.
Everyone's built a RAG demo. Almost nobody's built one that holds up on scanned PDFs, corporate jargon, and users who actually expect correct answers. For Wondercall AI I built the ingestion pipeline (OCR, layout-aware chunking, dedup), hybrid dense + BM25 retrieval with cross-encoder reranking, grounded refusals, and per-tenant isolation of data and model-call budgets.
Four concrete reasons.
Ingestion dominates
Most wins in production RAG are in the pipeline before the model. OCR quality, layout-aware chunking, deduplication — each moves retrieval precision more than any prompt change I've tried.
Hybrid retrieval, not pure vector
Vector search loses to keyword search on specific queries. Hybrid dense + BM25 merge, cross-encoder rerank, confidence floors. Shipped, tuned, eval-tracked.
Refusals are a feature
An AI that answers confidently-and-wrong burns user trust forever. Wondercall's grounded refusals reject below a confidence floor. One good refusal is worth ten correct answers.
Citations to the span, not the doc
Useful citations link to the paragraph, not the filename. That means keeping document offsets through chunking, storing them with the vectors, rendering them in the UI — infra work that demos skip and production requires.
A shipped case study doing exactly this.
Real ranges, no back-and-forth.
Production RAG pipeline: ingestion, retrieval, reranking, eval fixtures, grounded generation. 6–12 weeks. More for multi-tenant overlay or custom OCR / parser work.
See all engagement packages →What they said after shipping.
“Imad Rashid is not only the best technical professional I've come across in my extensive experience within the technology startup and advisory sphere, but he also consistently exceeds expectations on freelancing and contracting platforms. His impeccable work ethic and attention to detail ensure that every project is completed with the highest standards of testing and quality.”
★★★★★ · Locyal founder · Locyal — Rewards Platform (MVP)
“Working with Imad and his team on our app development was an outstanding experience. Every milestone was met with exceptional attention to detail, and they went above and beyond to ensure the highest quality in their deliverables. Their ability to bring a vision to life and exceed expectations makes them a go-to for any future projects.”
★★★★★ · Startup founder · Full-stack Flutter app