Researcher LLMs

Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd.; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A global technology company in Montreal is seeking a Researcher to join its innovative team for a 12-month contract. The role involves participating in cutting-edge research focused on large language models (LLMs) and developing robust training pipelines. Ideal candidates will have a Master's or Ph.D. in Computer Science, strong Python programming skills, and a deep understanding of natural language processing. Proficiency in English is essential for communication with international teams, while a French-speaking environment is prioritized.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of large language models (LLMs) and state-of-the-art methods.
• Experience with linear-attention models (e.g., GDN, Mamba).
• Hands-on experience with diffusion models is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Participate in applied research on enabling long-context LLMs.
• Develop and maintain training pipelines, including data preprocessing.
• Collaborate with researchers for production-quality implementations.

Skills

Understanding of NLP

Programming skills in Python

Expertise in PyTorch

Experience with LLM training and inference

Strong communication skills

Education

Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science

Tools

Hugging Face Transformers

Megatron-LM

Distributed training systems (FSDP, DeepSpeed)

Job description

Huawei Canada has an immediate 12-month contract opening for a Researcher.

About the team:

Founded in 2012, the Noah’s Ark lab has evolved into a prominent research organization with notable achievements in academia and industry. The lab’s mission focuses on advancing artificial intelligence and related fields to benefit the company and society. Driven by impactful, long-term projects, the aim is to enhance state-of-the-art research while integrating innovations into the company's products and services, including LLMs, RL, NLP, computer vision, AI theory, and Autonomous driving.

About the job:

• Participate in applied research projects focused on enabling long-context LLMs, including work on efficient architectures, data curation, and post-training methods

• Develop and maintain training, post-training, and fine-tuning pipelines, including data preprocessing and evaluation workflows.

• Collaborate with researchers to translate novel ideas into production-quality implementations.

• Track advancements in LLM architectures, tooling, and systems, and incorporate relevant developments into engineering workflows.

• Publish research in top-tier machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) conferences.

About the ideal candidate:

• A Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• A deep understanding of NLP and large language model (LLM) fundamentals and state-of-the-art methods, coupled with a strong theoretical grounding in machine learning.

• Expertise in modern LLM architectures, including transformer models (e.g., Llama, Qwen) and good knowledge in linear-attention models (e.g., GDN, Mamba, GLA).

• Excellent programming skills in Python, with strong expertise in PyTorch.

• Experience with LLM training and inference stacks, such as Hugging Face Transformers/Accelerate, Megatron-LM, vLLM, or similar systems.

• Hands‑on experience with distributed training (FSDP, DeepSpeed, DDP) and inference systems for large‑scale LLMs is highly desirable.

• Experience with diffusion models is a plus.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively across engineering and research ideas.

Huawei aims to support a French-speaking work environment for its employees in Quebec. We have taken steps to avoid requiring a language other than French for this position. However, proficiency in English is essential for this role for the following reasons: The person will be required to communicate regularly with colleagues located outside Quebec, where English is the primary language used for communication between offices. In addition, the nature of the tasks related to this position, which falls within a highly specialized field of artificial intelligence, also requires knowledge of English.