Machine Learning/AI Engineer
About Mind Moves
Mind Moves is a women-owned Washington, D.C.-based firm helping businesses and governments to embrace, build and deploy ‘human in the loop’ AI solutions to elevate mission and value. We are pioneers with deep expertise in the field of machine learning and AI (both predictive and generative). We have delivered responsibly developed products and services that impact millions of users worldwide, while generating millions of dollars in revenue. We have worked with Fortune 500 corporations and large government entities in health care, supply chain management, financial services and life sciences. We apply a structured methodology and holistic approach to AI transformation and a broad spectrum of technical services centered in the harnessing of people, science and technology.
What you’ll be doing
Helping to guide a group of cross-functional teams as they move their use cases from idea to shaping a use case to Minimum Viable Product (MVP). These teams will consist of various members from different institutes or centers of the National Institutes of Health and as such, propose use cases that are typically in the medical research or public health space, for internal or external audiences.
Working with Mind Moves
You’ll collaborate with client leads, business operators, fellow consultants, and the Mind Moves project team—while working closely with world-leading scientists at NIH and Mind Moves. This role offers the chance to:
Make a measurable impact on scientific discovery and public health.
Gain hands-on experience with frontier AI/ML technologies.
Operate at the intersection of health, data, and AI in a creative, mission-driven environment.
The contract will include:
Deliver 'knowledge sessions' to teams to familiarize and give working knowledge to teams
Assist in data engineering and preparation tasks to enable teams who may not have engineering resources to utilize their data or new data sources
Rapidly develop proof-of-concept AI prototypes and functional demos to validate use cases, accelerate stakeholder buy-in
Demonstrate iterative value creation across team capabilities
Collaborate with cross-functional teams across federal agencies and supporting partners
Designing solutions with defined requirements
Innovating ‘outside the box’ while accounting for risk
Articulate the art of the impossible and lead to the edge of the frontier of innovation
Contractor has the following skills/background:
7+ years professional experience in Data Science, Machine Learning, or AI Engineering
Azure expertise is essential — deep, hands-on experience with Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI Service, Azure Cosmos DB, and the M365 ecosystem (Teams, SharePoint, Copilot); general cloud experience is not sufficient
Production-level RAG implementation — retrieval strategy, relevance ranking, chunking, access-controlled data filtering, and evaluation; this is a non-negotiable core requirement
Strong GenAI/LLM depth — prompt engineering, model selection and strategy, structured outputs, evaluation frameworks, and guardrails
Demonstrated experience designing and orchestrating agentic AI workflows using LangChain, AutoGen, or Microsoft Semantic Kernel
Knowledge graph / graph database experience (Neo4j or Azure Cosmos DB with graph API) — entity modeling, relationship design, query and visualization
Databricks and MCP integration experience
Data engineering and ETL — pipeline design, API integration, backend development
AI governance aligned with NIST AI RMF, NIH/HHS requirements, including human-in-the-loop workflow design and RBAC in federal environments
Proficiency in Python, PyTorch, and SQL
Background or experience in biomedical, bioinformatics, or life sciences preferred
Experience taking solutions from proof of concept through MVP to production deployment
Strong communication skills; ability to lead knowledge sessions with non-technical stakeholders
US-based required
Compensation range: Proposals accepted from $100-110/hour
Estimated contract duration: 12 months
Contract hours: 40 hours/week
Work locale: 100% remote in the US
Security: If selected, candidates will be required to complete a full background check.
To apply: If interested, please upload your resume and complete this short form.
Timeline and Process
This opportunity has an immediate start date.
The contract bid process will include 2-3 interviews and the invitation to complete a technical exercise.
Skills
As published by ashby · 18 questions · 3 written answers
Basics
Name, Email, Resume
Short answers (10)
- Please share the link to your LinkedIn profile
- If available, provide your Github, website or any references to relevant work. optional
- Phone number
- Have you worked on government contracts or with federal agencies? If yes, briefly describe your role. If not, you can indicate N/A.
- Do you have experience working in health, medicine, or life sciences — whether directly with health data, clinical systems, research institutions, or regulated health environments? If yes, please briefly describe.
- What's the most Azure-native system you've shipped?
- Which city are you currently based?
- When could you begin?
- How did you hear about the opportunity?
- We care deeply about getting to know the real you. Our interview process includes measures to ensure authentic candidate engagement — AI assistance tools during interviews aren't compatible with that goal, and we encourage only those prepared to show up as themselves to apply. We also utilize Sherlock AI to ensure authenticity. To confirm that you have read and understood this notice and agree to complete all interviews without the use of AI assistance tools, please write this one word in your response AUTHENTIC.
Pick from a list (5)
- Have you built anything using a knowledge graph?
- Do you have experience creating synthetic data?
- Client meetings and coordination for this role are generally scheduled within standard Eastern business hours (roughly 8:00 AM–6:00 PM EST) to align with client and team availability. Are you generally able to accommodate meetings within that window?
- To complete this 1099 contract, would you now or in the future require sponsorship to work in the U.S.? optional
- Do you possess professional working proficiency in English across reading, writing, speaking, and listening? optional
Written answers (3)
- Which Azure services were load-bearing, and what would have been painful to replicate on another cloud?
- What did you model, how did you query it, and what did the graph let you do that a relational database wouldn't?
- Why are you interested in working at Mind Moves? optional