Researcher - Physical AI

About the role

Huawei Canada’s Noah’s Ark Laboratory is seeking a researcher to advance Physical AI, Embodied AI and Spatial AI. The 12‑month contract role involves bridging cutting‑edge research with real‑world robotic deployments.

Key responsibilities

• Develop state‑of‑the‑art approaches for Physical AI, including robotic foundation models, world models, multimodal representation learning, reasoning, planning, imitation learning and reinforcement learning.
• Translate problem formulations and model designs into efficient, production‑ready code and iterate rapidly through experiments.
• Design and run experiments on both simulation and real‑world robotic platforms, handling data collection, evaluation and performance analysis.
• Collaborate across research, infrastructure and robotics teams to close the loop between data, models and real‑world performance.
• Contribute high‑impact research outputs such as patents and publications in top‑tier AI and robotics venues.

Required profile

• PhD in Computer Science, Robotics or a related field (or Master’s with equivalent experience).
• Strong background in generative AI and sequence modeling, especially vision‑language or multimodal systems.
• Proven research track record with first‑author papers in top venues (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ECCV, ICRA).

Required skills

• Proficient in Python and deep‑learning frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Hands‑on experience with robotics systems, including ROS, decision‑making, planning and low‑level control.
• Experience with large‑scale datasets, sensor data, transformer‑based architectures and diffusion models.
• Familiarity with reinforcement learning and/or imitation learning methods.