Research Engineer – Multimodal AI & Interaction

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Researcher.

About the team:

The Huawei Human-Machine Interaction Lab unites global researchers, engineers, and designers to redefine human technology relationships through user centered, hands on research. We focus on agentic AI and multimodal interaction (voice, touch, vision, gesture) across smartphones, wearables, and emerging devices—advancing agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, and intuitive human-AI interfaces. By tightly integrating sensing, algorithms, and systems, our prototype driven work ships directly to products, enabling seamless task delegation and human AI collaboration at scale.

About the job:

• Research, design, and build next-generation multimodal AI capabilities for intelligent consumer devices, spanning speech/audio, vision, language, touch, gesture, motion, and contextual sensing
• Identify high-impact research problems and own projects from early exploration through model development, evaluation, and product-oriented validation
• Design, train, fine-tune, and evaluate deep learning and foundation models for multimodal perception, reasoning, interaction, and generation
• Develop new approaches for reasoning across modalities to enable more natural, adaptive human-machine interaction
• Rapidly prototype research ideas, reproduce state-of-the-art methods, and evolve promising concepts into robust demonstrations
• Build datasets and evaluation methodologies, run rigorous experiments, and establish metrics reflecting both model performance and real interaction quality
• Optimize models for real-world constraints (latency, memory, power, privacy, robustness, on-device vs. cloud) and collaborate across research, engineering, and product teams
• Contribute reproducible code, documentation, and IP through publications, patents, or open-source projects when appropriate

The total target annual compensation for this position ranges from $106,000 - $156,000 depending on education, experience, and demonstrated expertise.

About the ideal candidate:

• Master's or PhD in CS, EE/CE, AI, ML, Statistics, Math, HCI, or related field (exceptional Bachelor's candidates considered)
• Strong foundation in ML/deep learning with hands-on experience in PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar
• Technical depth in multimodal learning, speech/audio, computer vision, NLP, generative AI, or foundation models
• Experience with LLMs/VLMs, agentic AI, multi-agent systems, or context-aware intelligent systems is a strong asset
• Track record turning research into working systems: prototypes, open-source, patents, publications, or shipped products
• End-to-end ML development experience: data prep, training, evaluation, debugging, optimization, deployment
• Understanding of practical AI trade-offs (quality, latency, compute, memory, robustness) and on-device/resource-constrained deployment
• 3+ years relevant research or industry experience (including graduate research), with strong Python (Typescript / Kotlin, C++/Java a plus) and collaboration skills across teams