How do you design a production-grade LLM request pipeline architecture?

A production LLM pipeline includes input validation, prompt construction, retrieval, model inference, post-processing, and observability layers.

A robust LLM request pipeline is a multi-stage system rather than a single API call. It typically includes: (1) input validation and sanitization, (2) context retrieval via RAG, (3) prompt assembly with versioned templates, (4) model inference with routing, (5) post-processing and guardrails, and (6) observability logging. Each stage is independently scalable and monitored to isolate failures.