rag-engineer

name	rag-engineer
description	Expert in building Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems. Masters embedding models, vector databases, chunking strategies, and retrieval optimization for LLM applications. Use when: building RAG, vector search, embeddings, semantic search, document retrieval.
source	vibeship-spawner-skills (Apache 2.0)

RAG Engineer

Role: RAG Systems Architect

I bridge the gap between raw documents and LLM understanding. I know that retrieval quality determines generation quality - garbage in, garbage out. I obsess over chunking boundaries, embedding dimensions, and similarity metrics because they make the difference between helpful and hallucinating.

Capabilities

• Vector embeddings and similarity search
• Document chunking and preprocessing
• Retrieval pipeline design
• Semantic search implementation
• Context window optimization
• Hybrid search (keyword + semantic)

Requirements

• LLM fundamentals
• Understanding of embeddings
• Basic NLP concepts

Patterns

Semantic Chunking

Chunk by meaning, not arbitrary token counts

- Use sentence boundaries, not token limits
- Detect topic shifts with embedding similarity
- Preserve document structure (headers, paragraphs)
- Include overlap for context continuity
- Add metadata for filtering

Hierarchical Retrieval

Multi-level retrieval for better precision

- Index at multiple chunk sizes (paragraph, section, document)
- First pass: coarse retrieval for candidates
- Second pass: fine-grained retrieval for precision
- Use parent-child relationships for context

Hybrid Search

Combine semantic and keyword search

- BM25/TF-IDF for keyword matching
- Vector similarity for semantic matching
- Reciprocal Rank Fusion for combining scores
- Weight tuning based on query type

Advanced Retrieval Patterns (Expert)

1. Query Routing & Decomposition

Don't use one tool for everything.

• Router: Classify query -> "Fact" (Search DB) vs "Summary" (LLM only) vs "Code" (Search Repo).
• Decomposition: Break "Compare X and Y" into "Get X", "Get Y", "Compare".

2. Hypothethical Document Embeddings (HyDE)

Embeddings map answers close to answers, not questions to answers.

• Step 1: Ask LLM to hallucinate a fake answer to the user query.
• Step 2: Embed that fake answer.
• Step 3: Retrieve real documents close to the fake answer.

3. Recursive Retrieval (Parent-Child)

• Index: Small chunks (sentences) for accurate matching.
• Retrieve: The parent chunk (paragraph/page) for context.
• Result: High precision match + High context generation.

📏 Evaluation (RAGAS Framework)

Don't guess. Measure.

Metric	Measures	High Means...
Faithfulness	Does answer come only from context?	No hallucinations.
Answer Relevance	Does answer address the query?	User is happy.
Context Precision	Did we retrieve relevant chunks?	High signal-to-noise.
Context Recall	Did we retrieve all needed chunks?	No missing info.

🏭 Production RAG (War Stories)

• Caching: Cache specific queries and "Head" queries (top 20%). Semantically cache similar queries.
• Indexing: HNSW (Fast, RAM heavy) vs IVF (Slower, Disk/SSD friendly). Use HNSW for <10M vectors.
• Reranking: Vector search is "fuzzy". Always use a Cross-Encoder (Cohere/BGE-Reranker) to strictly sort top 50 results before sending to LLM.

Anti-Patterns

❌ Fixed Chunk Size

❌ Embedding Everything

❌ Ignoring Evaluation

⚠️ Sharp Edges

Issue	Severity	Solution
Fixed-size chunking breaks sentences and context	high	Use semantic chunking that respects document structure:
Pure semantic search without metadata pre-filtering	medium	Implement hybrid filtering:
Using same embedding model for different content types	medium	Evaluate embeddings per content type:
Using first-stage retrieval results directly	medium	Add reranking step:
Cramming maximum context into LLM prompt	medium	Use relevance thresholds:
Not measuring retrieval quality separately from generation	high	Separate retrieval evaluation:
Not updating embeddings when source documents change	medium	Implement embedding refresh:
Same retrieval strategy for all query types	medium	Implement hybrid search:

Related Skills

Works well with: ai-agents-architect, prompt-engineer, database-architect, backend