RAG Development Services for Enterprise Knowledge Systems

We build retrieval-augmented generation systems that answer from your own documents with citations, respect the permissions of the person asking, and are measured against a real evaluation set rather than a demo that looked convincing.

Where RAG Goes Wrong

Why the demo worked and production did not

Almost every failed RAG project fails in retrieval, not generation. The model was rarely the problem.

It retrieves the wrong chunk confidently

The answer is fluent, cited, and wrong, because the retrieved passage looked semantically similar without actually containing the answer.

Tables and layout were destroyed at ingestion

The parser flattened a specification table into unusable text, so the number the user needs is no longer associated with what it describes.

Everyone sees everything

Retrieval ignores document permissions, so the assistant happily quotes a document the asking user has no right to read.

Nobody can tell whether a change helped

A chunk size gets tweaked, an embedding model swapped, and quality shifts with no test set to say in which direction.

Answers went stale without anyone noticing

Source documents were updated but the index was not, so the assistant confidently quotes a superseded policy.

It cannot say 'I do not know'

With no confidence threshold, an unanswerable question still produces a fluent answer assembled from whatever came back.

The Pipeline

Where retrieval quality is actually won

Each stage is measured separately, because a single end-to-end accuracy number tells you nothing about what to fix.

01

Parse

Preserve tables, headings, and layout at ingestion — most retrieval failures are created here, before anything is embedded.

02

Chunk

Split on document structure rather than a fixed token count, so a chunk is a coherent unit with its context attached.

03

Index

Embeddings plus lexical search plus metadata, because pure vector search misses exact identifiers and product codes.

04

Retrieve

Hybrid search with permission filters applied at query time, then reranking to put the genuinely relevant passage first.

05

Ground

Generate strictly from retrieved content with citations enforced, and abstain when confidence is below threshold.

Retrieval Design

The decisions that determine whether it works

These are the levers we tune against your corpus. There is no universally correct setting for any of them.

Hybrid search

Dense vectors find meaning; lexical search finds exact part numbers, clause references, and error codes. Production systems need both, weighted for your corpus.

  • Dense + sparse fusion
  • Weighting tuned per corpus
  • Exact-identifier handling

Chunking strategy

Structure-aware splitting with overlap and parent-document retrieval, so a matched fragment brings its surrounding context with it.

  • Structure-aware splitting
  • Parent-document retrieval
  • Table and list preservation

Reranking

A second-pass model reorders candidates so the genuinely relevant passage reaches the context window, not merely a similar-looking one.

  • Cross-encoder reranking
  • Candidate-set sizing
  • Latency and cost trade-offs

Metadata and filtering

Document type, date, department, and version as first-class filters, so retrieval can be scoped before similarity is ever considered.

  • Recency and version filters
  • Department and type scoping
  • Superseded-document handling

Query understanding

Rewriting, decomposition, and expansion so a vague or multi-part question becomes retrievable rather than returning noise.

  • Query rewriting
  • Multi-hop decomposition
  • Acronym and synonym expansion

Freshness and re-indexing

Incremental updates as source documents change, so the index reflects current truth without a full rebuild each time.

  • Incremental sync
  • Change detection
  • Deletion and supersession
Permissions

Retrieval that respects who is asking

This is the requirement that most often separates an internal demo from something legal will let you deploy.

Access filters applied at query time

The user's permissions constrain the candidate set before retrieval runs, rather than filtering results afterwards — which would still leak existence and content through the model.

Permissions mirrored from the source system

Access rights are synced from SharePoint, Google Drive, or your identity provider, so the assistant inherits your existing model instead of maintaining a second one that drifts.

Citations the user can actually open

Every cited source resolves to a document the asking user can retrieve themselves, which is both a verification path and a permissions check.

Deployment inside your boundary

Where documents cannot leave a network or jurisdiction, the retrieval layer and models run within it, including fully self-hosted configurations.

Evaluation

How we know it works, and keep knowing

Without an evaluation set, every change to a RAG system is a guess. This is the part most projects skip and later regret.

Retrieval measured separately from generation

We score whether the right passage was retrieved at all, independently of whether the answer read well. Conflating the two makes failures undiagnosable.

A test set built from real questions

Questions your users actually ask, including the ambiguous and unanswerable ones, with expected sources identified. Built during the project and owned by you.

Regression runs before every change

Chunking, embedding model, reranker, and prompt changes all run against the full set first, so an improvement on one question type cannot silently break another.

Abstention as a measured behaviour

Saying "I do not know" on an unanswerable question is a correct answer, and we score it as one rather than treating coverage as the only goal.

Production

What keeps it working after launch

Our open-source tooling exists because we needed these layers repeatedly — they are public and auditable rather than a black box.

Ingestion & parsing

Layout-preserving document parsing, including tables and multi-column content that standard parsers flatten. This is where LongParser came from.

Retrieval & reranking

Hybrid search with permission filters and a reranking pass, tuned against your corpus rather than a default configuration.

Grounding & citation

Generation constrained to retrieved content, with citation enforcement so an uncited claim does not reach the user.

Evaluation harness

Versioned test sets scoring retrieval and answer quality separately, run in CI. This is what LongProbe does.

Tracing & hallucination monitoring

Per-query traces covering retrieved chunks, scores, tokens, latency, and cost, with ungrounded-claim detection. This is what LongTracer does.

Freshness pipeline

Incremental re-indexing as sources change, including supersession, so the index does not quietly drift away from current truth.

Sources

Where your knowledge already lives

Connector quality and permission fidelity matter more than connector count.

Document Repositories

SharePointGoogle DriveConfluenceNotionS3Box

Business Systems

SalesforceHubSpotZendeskServiceNowJira

Databases & Warehouses

PostgreSQLSnowflakeElasticsearchQdrant

Identity

OktaAzure AD / Entra IDGoogle WorkspaceSAML & OIDC
How We Work

From a corpus sample to a system you trust

Step 01

AI reliability check

If something is already live, we review retrieval accuracy, grounding, latency, cost, and guardrails, and tell you what to fix first.

Step 02

Evaluation set first

Real questions with expected sources, built before tuning begins, so every subsequent decision is measurable rather than felt.

Step 03

Retrieval before generation

We get the right passages surfacing reliably before spending time on answer phrasing, because the reverse order wastes the most time.

Step 04

Production with tracing

Deployed with per-query tracing, freshness pipeline, and the evaluation harness handed over so your team can keep changing it safely.

Engineering

What we build with

Vector store and model choices follow the corpus and the deployment constraints. Both sit behind abstractions so they stay swappable.

LangChain
LangGraph
Qdrant
PostgreSQL
OpenAI
Claude
Gemini
Hugging Face
FastAPI
Python
FAQ

Questions buyers actually ask

Almost always because retrieval surfaced the wrong passage, not because the model hallucinated freely. A semantically similar chunk that does not actually contain the answer produces a fluent, cited, wrong response. The fix is in parsing, chunking, hybrid search, and reranking — and you cannot tell which one until retrieval is measured separately from answer quality.
Permission filters are applied at query time so the candidate set is constrained before retrieval runs, rather than filtering results afterwards — post-filtering still leaks content through the generated answer. Access rights are synced from your existing source system or identity provider rather than maintained separately, because a second permission model always drifts.
Fine-tuning changes the model's weights and is good for tone, format, and domain vocabulary. RAG leaves the model alone and retrieves relevant content at query time, which is what you want for knowledge: the corpus stays current without retraining, answers are traceable to sources, and it is far cheaper. For most business knowledge use cases, RAG is the correct choice, sometimes with light fine-tuning for style.
With an evaluation set built from real user questions, including ambiguous and unanswerable ones, with the expected source documents identified. Retrieval and generation are scored separately. Correctly abstaining on an unanswerable question counts as a right answer. The test set is built during the project and handed to you, because without it nobody can safely change the system later.
Better than standard parsers, which is precisely why we built LongParser as open source — flattening a specification table into plain text destroys the association between a value and what it describes, and no amount of retrieval tuning recovers it afterwards. Complex layouts still need validation against your specific documents during the evaluation phase.
Yes. Where documents cannot leave a network or jurisdiction, the parsing, index, retrieval layer, and models all run within your boundary, including fully self-hosted open-weight models. This constrains model choice and usually costs some answer quality, so we make that trade-off explicit rather than discovering it late.
A focused system covering ingestion, retrieval, an evaluation harness, and a chat interface typically reaches production in 4 to 8 weeks. Permission-aware retrieval across multiple repositories, unusual document formats, and self-hosted deployment each extend that. The evaluation baseline arrives early, so you can judge feasibility before the bulk of the spend.
Next Step

Find out why your RAG system is getting things wrong

A reliability check reviews retrieval accuracy, grounding, permissions, latency, cost, and guardrails on a system you already have in production — and tells you which fix will move the needle first.

RAG Development Services & Enterprise RAG Solutions | EnDevSols