Senior Researcher - Edge AI Optimization/Hardware-Aware ML

Huawei Canada; Edmonton; On-site; CAD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Huawei Canada invites applications for a permanent Researcher to advance hardware-aware neural network optimization for consumer devices. The role focuses on quantization, pruning, distillation, and NAS, with latency/energy-aware objectives and Pareto optimization.

You will prototype efficient inferences under device constraints, publish findings, and collaborate with product, platform, and hardware teams to transition research into production. A PhD or equivalent is required.

Qualifications

• PhD or equivalent research experience in ML / ML systems or related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and C/C++, with experience in AI tooling and evaluation.
• Proven publication record or patents in ML efficiency or edge AI.

Responsibilities

• Conduct hardware-aware neural network optimization research (quantization, pruning, distillation).
• Develop latency/energy-aware training objectives and Pareto optimization.
• Prototype and evaluate efficient inference under device constraints (thermal, memory).
• Publish findings internally and externally; contribute to papers and blogs.
• Collaborate with product, platform, and hardware teams to translate constraints into targets.
• Mentor junior researchers and raise measurement rigor and reproducibility.

Skills

Python

C/C++

Deep learning

PyTorch

TensorFlow

JAX

Education

PhD

Tools

TVM

MLIR

TensorRT

ONNX

TFLite

Job description

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Researcher.

About the team:

The Software-Hardware System Optimization Lab focuses on research and innovation in power efficiency and performance optimization for consumer devices. By leveraging the talents and capabilities of local academia and our team, we aim to build system-optimization capabilities for software and hardware across edge AI, multimedia, graphics, mobile gaming, and system software domains, thereby enhancing the user experience and performance competitiveness of Huawei's consumer device products.

About the job:

• Conduct research in hardware-aware neural network optimization (e.g., quantization-aware training, mixed precision, pruning, distillation, neural architecture search).
• Develop novel approaches for latency/energy-aware training objectives and Pareto optimization (accuracy vs. compute vs. memory).
• Prototype and evaluate techniques for efficient inference under device constraints (thermal limits, memory bandwidth, intermittent connectivity).
• Publish and present findings internally and externally (papers, workshops, patents, technical blogs).
• Optimize inference pipelines across pre/post-processing, scheduling, operator fusion, memory planning, and runtime execution.
• Collaborate on or contribute to compilers / runtimes (e.g., TVM, MLIR, XLA, TensorRT, ONNX Runtime, TFLite, ExecuTorch) to improve operator coverage and performance.
• Profile and optimize models with real device traces, addressing bottlenecks such as cache misses, memory bandwidth, kernel launch overhead, and CPU-NPU handoff.
• Build and maintain hardware-aware benchmarking methodology and regression suites for edge targets (ARM CPU, mobile GPU, DSP, NPU).
• Create deployment recipes for heterogeneous compute (CPU+GPU+NPU) including partitioning strategies and fallback paths.
• Drive optimization for on-device personalization and incremental updates when needed (e.g., small adapters, efficient fine-tuning).
• Partner with product engineering, platform teams, and hardware teams to translate device constraints into research targets and to transition research prototypes into production.
• Mentor junior researchers/engineers, review experimental designs, and raise the quality bar for measurement rigor and reproducibility.
• Define technical roadmap areas (e.g., next-gen quantization, kernel optimization, model families for edge, compiler improvements).

Job requirements

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD (or equivalent research experience) in Machine Learning, Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, or related field.
• Strong programming skills in Python and C/C++ (or equivalent systems language).Experience building AI agent / harness / skill toolchains, including model evaluation, orchestration, and LLM-powered tooling. Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) and deployment toolchains (e.g., ONNX, TFLite, TensorRT, TVM, MLIR-based stacks). Solid knowledge of performance profiling: latency measurement, memory profiling, kernel-level bottleneck analysis, and experimental rigor.
• Proven publication record at top venues (e.g., NeurIPS/ICML/ICLR, MLSys, ASPLOS, ISCA, MICRO) and/or patents in ML efficiency.
• 2+ years of relevant experience (research lab or industry) with demonstrated impact in at least one of:
  • Model compression (quantization/pruning/distillation)
  • Efficient architectures (MobileNet-like, MoE, efficient transformers, etc.)
  • ML systems/compilers/runtime optimization
  • hardware-aware optimization for edge deployment
• Experience optimizing for specific edge hardware:
  • ARM NEON, mobile GPUs, DSPs, NPUs, microcontrollers
  • Experience with distributed benchmarking, CI for performance regression, and reproducible experiment pipelines.
  • Understanding of power/thermal constraints and methodologies for measuring energy on device.
  • Experience with efficient LLM/VLM inference on edge (KV-cache optimization, quantized attention, speculative decoding, etc.).
• Technical Skills:
  • Quantization: PTQ/QAT, per-channel/per-tensor, calibration, smooth quant, GPTQ-like methods, mixed precision
  • Sparsity: structured pruning, N: M sparsity, hardware-friendly sparsity
  • Compiler techniques: graph rewriting, operator lowering, scheduling, kernel autotuning
  • Runtime techniques: memory arenas, tensor lifetime analysis, static vs dynamic shapes, batching strategies
  • Hardware fundamentals: cache hierarchy, SIMD, memory bandwidth, accelerator programming models

Additional Information:

Huawei Canada is committed to a fair, inclusive, and accessible recruitment process. If you require accommodation during any stage of the hiring process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

All applications for this position are reviewed directly by our hiring team, we do not use artificial intelligence tools to screen or select candidates.