Power Platform 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 cross-functional teams at the National Institutes of Health turn ideas into working Microsoft-based solutions, quickly. These teams come from different institutes and centers, and their use cases are typically in the medical research or public health space, for internal or external audiences. Most of them have no engineering resources of their own, so you will take a user story, shape it into a buildable requirement, and get a working prototype in front of them fast, using Power Platform as your primary toolset and the wider Microsoft 365 ecosystem around it.

We are looking for someone who can move quickly in small, focused blocks of time and make real progress each week.

Working with Mind Moves

You'll collaborate with client leads, business operators, fellow consultants, and the Mind Moves project team, while working closely with NIH staff and scientists. This role offers the chance to:

• Make a measurable impact on scientific discovery and public health.

• Build real tools that real teams use, not just demos that sit on a shelf.

• Operate at the intersection of health, data, and AI in a creative, mission-driven environment.

The contract will include:

• Translating user stories from non-technical NIH teams into clear technical requirements and acceptance criteria

• Rapidly building working prototypes in Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Copilot Studio to validate use cases and accelerate stakeholder buy-in

• Handing off validated prototypes with documented requirements, business logic, and known limitations to the team responsible for production deployment and ongoing support.

• Assembling creative builds across Microsoft connectors, custom connectors, and data pipelines, including SharePoint, Teams, and M365 Copilot

• Determining business logic with the people who will actually use the tool, and documenting the decisions behind it

• Finding ways to add value beyond what was asked for, such as automation, reporting, or smarter routing, without overbuilding

• Implementing safety guardrails in agentic workflows, including human-in-the-loop approvals, scoped data access, and clear escalation paths

• Delivering short 'knowledge sessions' so teams understand what was built and can keep using and extending it

• Collaborating with cross-functional teams across federal agencies and supporting partners

Contractor has the following skills/background

Core (essential)

• Hands-on Copilot Studio experience building agents, connecting them to organizational data, and implementing approvals, scoped data access, and failure handling.

• Deep, hands-on Microsoft Power Platform experience: Power Apps (canvas and model-driven), Power Automate cloud flows, and Dataverse. General low-code exposure is not sufficient.

• Strong command of connectors: standard, premium, and custom connectors, plus and API integration when a connector doesn't exist

• Solution lifecycle management in Power Platform: environments, solutions, source control, and moving builds from dev to production

• Demonstrated rapid prototyping: comfortable going from a rough idea to a working demo in days, and clear about what to cut to get there

• US-based required

Microsoft 365 ecosystem (highly desired)

• SharePoint (lists, libraries, permissions, and as a data layer for Power Platform apps)

• Microsoft Teams (apps, bots, and workflows built into Teams)

• Microsoft 365 Copilot experience, including extending it with agents

How you think (what we'll be looking for most closely)

• Translating user stories into technical requirements: asking the questions that turn a vague request into something buildable and testable

• Assembling creative builds from Microsoft connectors and pipelines: seeing options beyond the obvious one and choosing well among them

• Determining business logic: working out the rules, exceptions, and edge cases with the people who own the process

• Generating added value: noticing what would make a tool meaningfully more useful and knowing when to stop

• Implementing safety guardrails in agentic workflows: human-in-the-loop design, least-privilege data access, approvals, logging, and failure handling

Also valuable

• Power Platform governance: DLP policies, role-based access, and working within a Center of Excellence approach

• Experience in federal environments, including GCC tenants and alignment with NIST AI RMF and NIH/HHS requirements

• Power BI, Azure integration (Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, Logic Apps), or Python and SQL for the cases where low-code isn't enough

• Accessibility (Section 508) awareness for public-facing or federal tools

• Background or experience in biomedical, bioinformatics, or life sciences

• Strong communication skills; ability to lead short knowledge sessions with non-technical stakeholders

Proposal details

• Compensation range: Proposals accepted from $100 - $110/hour 1099

• Estimated contract duration: October 2026-June 2027

• 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.

Timeline and process

This opportunity has an immediate start date. Proposals are accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

The contract interview process will include 2–3 interviews and the invitation to complete a short, hands-on technical exercise. The exercise is a rapid prototyping task: you'll be given a short user story and asked to turn it into a working Power Platform build, then walk us through your choices.