Machine Learning/AI Engineer

Department: Engineering

Location: United States, Eastern Timezone

Compensation: $80 – $90 per hour

Employment Type: Contract

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

• Eastern Time Zone required, Maryland/Virginia/DC area preferred

Proposal Details

Compensation range: Proposals accepted from $80-90/hour

Estimated contract duration: 12 months

Contract hours: 40 hours/week

Work locale: 100% remote in the EST required and DC metro area preferred

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. Priority deadline to submit proposals is September 15th with an ideal start date in September, though proposals are accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

The contract bid process will include 2-3 interviews and the invitation to complete a technical exercise.