Researcher - LLMs

Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd.; Montreal (administrative region); On-site; CAD 80,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Huawei Technologies Canada Co., Ltd. is looking for a Researcher for a 12-month contract based in Montreal. This position involves participating in applied research projects aimed at enhancing long-context LLMs and developing efficient architectures and data workflows.

The ideal candidate will have a Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related fields, with expertise in NLP and transformer models, along with excellent Python programming skills. French language support is provided, but proficiency in English is essential for communication.

Qualifications

• Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Deep understanding of NLP and large language model (LLM) fundamentals.
• Expertise in modern LLM architectures, including transformer models.

Responsibilities

• Participate in applied research projects focused on enabling long-context LLMs.
• Develop and maintain training, post-training, and fine-tuning pipelines.
• Collaborate with researchers to translate novel ideas into production-quality implementations.

Skills

Deep understanding of NLP and LLM fundamentals

Expertise in modern LLM architectures

Excellent programming skills in Python

Experience with LLM training stacks

Strong communication skills

Education

Master’s or Ph.D. in Computer Science or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face Transformers/Accelerate

Job description

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.

Job requirements

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 an asset.
• Experience with diffusion models is an asset.
• 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.