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Production RAG assistant for customer communities

Ask Kindred

I led Ask Kindred from SDK integration through production: a retrieval-grounded assistant serving about 200 daily active users across three customer companies.

Role
Lead engineer
Team
Led a team of 4–5 engineers and designers
Status
In production at Rare Days
Stack
RAG architecture, LLM chatbots, Multi-tenant SaaS, Access control

Outcome

Ask Kindred serves approximately 200 daily active users across three customer companies, with grounded retrieval, citations, conversation history and feedback running in production.

  • ~200daily active users in production
  • 3customer companies served
  • 10+CI improvements to release quality

What I owned

Led the product from SDK integration through production for three customer companies, owning the system from retrieval architecture through backend delivery and reliable releases.

Built reusable content-ingestion, retrieval and production safeguards across CMS and community data, improving the quality, trust and reliability of customer-facing AI.

Designed the multi-tenant SaaS architecture, including backend infrastructure and role-aware access controls, and mentored engineers on the team.

System at a glance

Customers embed the assistant through an SDK integration.

  1. Customers embed the assistant through an SDK integration.
  2. Content from CMS and community sources is ingested and prepared for retrieval.
  3. Answers are grounded in retrieved content and returned with citations.
  4. Conversation history and user feedback are kept so quality can be reviewed and improved.
  5. Sentry across frontend and backend makes production issues easier to detect, diagnose and resolve before users feel them.

Key decisions

  • Grounded retrieval with citations, so customer-facing answers can be checked against their source.
  • Reusable ingestion and retrieval building blocks, shared with other Rare Days projects instead of rebuilt per customer.
  • Role-aware access controls in a multi-tenant design, so each customer sees only their own content.

How I approached reliability

  • Introduced Sentry across frontend and backend services.
  • Delivered 10+ CI improvements that strengthened release quality and platform reliability.
  • Built production safeguards into the ingestion and retrieval layer.

Technology focus

  • RAG architecture
  • LLM chatbots
  • Multi-tenant SaaS
  • Access control
  • CI/CD
  • Sentry