Senior Principal Researcher – AI Agent & Multimodal Interaction System

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Senior Principal 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:

• Define and drive the end-to-end vision for next-generation AI agent–native multimodal interaction systems. Define how agents perceive, reason, and act through multimodal signals (voice, vision, touch, context).
• Design interaction models centered on agent autonomy and collaboration, moving beyond traditional GUI/VUI toward intent-driven and context-aware experiences.
• Lead the design of seamless multimodal experiences across platforms (e.g., mobile, automotive, wearables, smart environments), ensuring consistency and adaptability.
• Lead the integration of multimodal foundation models (VLM, multimodal LLMs) into real-world interaction systems.
• Lead the design of seamless multimodal experiences across: Mobile, AI PC, automotive, AI glasses, wearable devices, and smart environments.
• Iterate quickly from concept to production-ready solutions, evaluating usability, latency, feedback loops, and real-world behavior prior to production.
• Identify opportunities to unify interaction frameworks across modalities, reducing fragmentation between voice, visual, and physical interfaces.
• Drive end-to-end experience thinking, from perception and reasoning to response and user feedback, rather than isolated component optimization.
• Stay at the forefront of industry trends (e.g., AI agents, multimodal foundation models, embodied AI) and translate them into product innovations and high-value IP / patents.

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD or Master degree in Computer Science (HCI, AI, Computing System), Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong understanding of multimodal AI systems, including how perception (audio, vision, other sensing modalities) and MM language models interact in real-world applications.
• Experience designing or shipping AI-driven user experiences (e.g., voice assistants, copilots, agents, or multimodal interfaces) at scale.
• Ability to think beyond existing paradigms (e.g., GUI, VUI) and define new interaction models enabled by AI.
• Hands-on experience with Multimodal LLMs or Vision-Language Models and Real-world applications of foundation models in interaction systems.
• Familiarity with the end-to-end stack of intelligent systems (perception → reasoning → action), even if not specializing in a single component.
• Strong product intuition and user-centric thinking, with the ability to balance technical feasibility and experience quality.
• Proven track record of delivering innovative interaction experiences to large-scale consumer products, or equivalent impact through influential research (publications at CHI, UIST, NeurIPS, InterSpeech, ICASSP, ICLR, or similar venues).
• Excellent cross-functional communication skills, able to align engineering, design, and research stakeholders.