South helps growing companies find, hire, and pay top Latin American talent. Build high-performing teams in 21 days or less.
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A RAG Engineer designs and ships the retrieval pipeline that sits between your corpus of documents and the language model generating answers. That sounds simple until you try to do it well. The job spans document ingestion, parsing PDFs and HTML and Confluence exports cleanly, chunking strategies that balance context length against recall, embedding model selection, vector database choice and configuration, hybrid search combining BM25 with dense retrieval, reranking with cross encoders, and finally the prompt layer that hands retrieved context to the generator. Each of those decisions has production consequences, and a good RAG Engineer has opinions on all of them.
Tool wise, expect fluency with Pinecone, Weaviate, Chroma, Qdrant, or pgvector on Postgres, plus embedding options from OpenAI, Cohere, Voyage, and open source models like BGE and E5. Orchestration is usually LlamaIndex or LangChain, though many teams have moved to lighter custom code for production. Evaluation is non negotiable: RAGAS, TruLens, or a homegrown eval framework measuring retrieval precision, recall at k, context relevance, answer faithfulness, and answer correctness. Observability through Langfuse, Arize Phoenix, or LangSmith is table stakes.
The outcome a RAG Engineer owns is a system that answers questions from your data correctly, cites sources, stays inside a cost and latency budget, and does not degrade silently when the corpus grows or the embedding model changes.
Strong candidates have opinions that survive contact with production.
Seniority breakdown. Junior (1-2 years) engineers can build a basic RAG pipeline using LlamaIndex or LangChain, set up a vector database, and produce working prototypes with guidance. Mid level (3-5 years) engineers own ingestion and retrieval quality end to end, run evaluation studies, and make defensible choices about embedding models and chunking. Senior (5+ years) engineers design RAG architectures for scale, own the observability and cost story, lead migrations between vector databases or embedding providers without quality regression, and mentor teams through the RAG design space.
The region has the perfect mix of everything you want in remote employees: English skills, shared time zones, hard-working, and depth of talent. They are already accustomed to working remotely for top US startups and Fortune 500 companies.
Absolutely! The US and Latin America have basically the same time zones. No Latin American city is more than two hours ahead of EST.
Every hire is sourced based on your exact needs. They will arrive ready to support your business right away. They can do basically any tasks done remotely, but we recommend starting them as support so your team has more bandwidth for high-value strategic tasks.
All types of roles - customer service, executive assistant, sales, accounting, email marketing, lead generation, content writers, operations, social media marketing, and more!
You can pay directly through us (most popular) or we can connect you with one of our payroll partners.
You don't have to deal with any American labor laws / taxes when hiring full-time remote contractors. They aren't US-based, so no visas or sponsorships to deal with either.
We recommend market pay which varies for each role. See our salary guide and success stories for some ideas.
Then, we have two different models:
Staffing (most popular) - We charge a small monthly fee for each employee's monthly salary to make the process hassle-free. The fee covers sourcing, recruiting, admin, payroll, compliance, ongoing support, and a free replacement if necessary at any point. There are no cancellation fees or minimum commitments. You only pay if you make a hire.
Headhunting - A one-time simple fee once we've found the perfect candidate. This comes with a 120-day replacement guarantee.
For both options, you only pay something if we find you someone great that you want to hire.
Yes, we only recruit for full-time and we strongly recommend full-time hiring if you can. Stability (full-time & long-term) is highly sought after abroad. The top caliber candidates are only looking for full-time work.
You're also going to spend time training and getting them up to speed on your processes. It would be a waste to do that over and over again with new people all the time.
We recommend training new hires on one thing at a time.
For example, once they get up to speed on lead generation, you can add the next role writing blog posts or whatever you'd like. You can definitely overlap roles until you have enough work for multiple people.
The cost of living is much less in Latin American countries. Many of our employees are able to own homes, raise families, provide for their parents, and have in-home help of their own with their salaries.
If you aren't happy with your hire in the first 120 days, we will work with you to conduct a second round of search for the same role for free.
Just email us at Hello@HireInSouth.com and we will get back to you with an answer as soon as possible.
