AI Researcher (12‑month contract)

About the role

Huawei Canada has an immediate 12‑month contract opening for a Researcher. The Software‑Hardware System Optimization Lab continuously improves the power efficiency and performance of smartphone products through software‑hardware systems optimization and architecture innovation.

Key responsibilities

• Conduct state‑of‑the‑art literature surveys, formulate novel research hypotheses, and prototype RL‑driven optimization algorithms tailored for large‑scale generative models deployed on resource‑constrained edge devices.
• Explore next‑generation application paradigms where reinforcement learning can unlock unprecedented on‑device intelligence and performance.
• Collaborate closely with researchers to prototype, implement, and integrate research ideas into production‑grade code.
• Design and run rigorous experiments on internal and public benchmarks; build reproducible pipelines, ablations, and statistical analyses.
• Stay current with literature, distill insights, and propose and drive new research directions.

Required profile

• MS/PhD in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Applied Mathematics, or a related quantitative field.
• Solid theoretical foundation in Reinforcement Learning (MDPs, deep RL algorithms such as PPO, SAC, DQN, policy gradients, or model‑based RL).
• Demonstrated research experience or publication record in top AI/ML/System conferences (NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, MLSys, CVPR, AAAI, etc.).
• Strong hands‑on experience with deep‑learning frameworks (PyTorch, JAX, or TensorFlow) and proficiency in Python and Linux/Unix environments (e.g., Ubuntu), plus C++ or CUDA programming for low‑level system profiling and operator optimization.
• Familiarity with modern generative model architectures (Transformers, Diffusion models, Vision Transformers).
• Understanding of hardware constraints in edge environments (memory bandwidth bottlenecks, power envelopes, KV‑cache management, NPU/GPU acceleration).

Required skills

• Python
• Linux/Unix (Ubuntu)
• C++
• CUDA
• PyTorch
• JAX
• TensorFlow
• Reinforcement Learning
• PPO
• SAC
• DQN
• Transformers
• Diffusion models
• Vision Transformers