Senior Researcher - Efficient Architecture for LLMs

Huawei Technologies Co.; Montreal (administrative region); Hybrid; CAD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Huawei Canada is seeking a Researcher on a 12-month contract to advance LLM research in Noah’s Ark Lab. You will design experiments, develop novel ideas, and contribute to long-context LLM work alongside researchers and engineers.

You will publish at top ML/NLP conferences, supervise a small team, and translate recent AI advances into product-oriented insights. Proficiency in English is required for collaboration with global teams.

Qualifications

• PhD in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
• First-author publications in top ML/NLP venues.
• Deep NLP and LLM fundamentals with solid ML theory.
• Expertise in LLM architectures, Transformers.
• Proficient Python with PyTorch; experience with LLM stacks.

Responsibilities

• Propose and develop novel research ideas to advance LLMs.
• Lead end-to-end experiments and publish findings.
• Mentor a small team of researchers and engineers.
• Publish in top ML/NLP conferences.
• Track advances and translate to actionable insights.

Skills

Python

PyTorch

NLP

Transformers

LLM stacks

First-author papers

Research communication

Education

PhD in Computer Science or related field

Tools

Hugging Face Transformers

Accelerate

Megatron-LM

vLLM

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:

• Propose and develop novel research ideas to advance the state of the art in large language models (LLMs).
• Participate in applied research projects focused on enabling long-context LLMs, including work on efficient architectures, data curation, and post-training methods.
• Deliver end-to-end projects by designing and executing experiments, analyzing results, and presenting findings.
• Publish research in top-tier machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) conferences.
• Supervise and mentor a small group of researchers and engineers to deliver projects and publish conference papers.
• Track advances across the LLM and AI ecosystem, translating new developments into actionable insights for the team.

About the ideal candidate:

• A Ph.D. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• First-author publications in top-tier machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP) venues such as NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, or NAACL.
• 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 linear-attention models (e.g., Mamba, GLA).
• Strong programming skills in Python with expertise in PyTorch.
• Experience with modern LLM training and inference stacks (e.g., Hugging Face Transformers/Accelerate, Megatron-LM, vLLM).
• Excellent oral and written communication skills.

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.