Senior Researcher, Neurosymbolic Reasoning

Huawei Finland R&D; Helsinki; On-site; EUR 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Occupational healthcare

Culture & sports perks

Phone benefits

Job summary

Huawei Finland R&D in Helsinki leads the Cloud Content Security Lab, focusing on AI safety, alignment, and scalable detection systems for Harmony OS and related products.

The lab invites a PhD researcher to design novel multimodal AI architectures, improve interpretability, and build robust defenses. You will work with international researchers, publish in top venues, and translate theory into production-grade tools.

Qualifications

• PhD in CS, DL, ML, Mathematics or related field.
• Strong focus on AI safety and Explainable AI research.
• Proven proficiency with LLMs/VLMs, neural networks and neuro-symbolic AI.
• Experience with graph reasoning architectures and knowledge graphs.
• Strong programming background in Python, Java or C++ and ML frameworks (PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Publication record in top conferences (e.g., NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML/AAAI/ACL/ CVPR/ICCV/EMNLP/NAACL).
• Experience in AI alignment to human values and model robustness is valued.
• Ability to work in multinational teams and challenge status quo.

Responsibilities

• Design and implement AI detection architectures for multimodal data (images, videos, text, cultural knowledge).
• Research visual QA, reasoning, and multimodal grounding; explore neural-symbolic methods.
• Develop interpretable, unbiased and aligned AI systems for real-world scenarios.
• Advance alignment techniques for LLMs/CoT/agentic workflows and multi-step reasoning.
• Reverse-engineer neural networks to reveal internal workings and apply explainability tools.
• Create data attribution methods to quantify data influence on predictions.
• Build benchmarks/datasets to measure reasoning quality and explanations.
• Develop defenses against jailbreaking, prompt injections and adversarial exploits.
• Communicate insights to stakeholders and translate research into production-ready code.
• Collaborate to turn AI safety papers into scalable frameworks.

Skills

LLMs/VLMs

Neural networks

Neural-symbolic AI

Graph reasoning

Python

Java

C++

Explainable AI

Safety

Education

PhD in Computer Science / Deep Learning / ML / Mathematics

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

Job description

Huawei Consumer Business Group is the leader in the all-scenario AI life. It covers smartphones, PC and tablets, wearables, mobile broadband devices, family devices and device cloud services. Huawei Consumer Business Group is dedicated to delivering the latest technologies to consumers. We believe in creating safe, privacy-friendly, and high-quality products with great user experiences for our consumers.

The mission of Cloud Content Security Lab at our Helsinki Research Center is to protect the online safety of Huawei mobile users within the Harmony OS ecosystem through technological advancements. We build advance AI detection solutions to ensure content safety, safety in LLMs & agentic AI such as alignment and machine unlearning. We are looking for a passionate and motivated researcher with a solid track record of solving challenging problems, advancing state-of-the-art, and demonstrated passion for ground-breaking research that could be scaled to production environment with an emphasis on the intersection of AI and Safety.

Your responsibilities:

• Design and implement effective, efficient and novel architecture to enable AI detection system that understands and able to reason over complex multimodal data, such as images, videos, text and cultural knowledge.

• Explore novel techniques for visual question answering, visual reasoning, text-based reasoning, and multimodal knowledge grounding. Explore the use of knowledge graphs and other neural-symbolic techniques to enhance reasoning capabilities.

• Create new techniques to make AI models/Agentic AI system more interpretable, unbiased, transparent and aligned with human values for real-world scenarios.

• Create new techniques to ensure consistent alignment between user-centric explanations and intrinsic model behavior. Develop and implement state-of-the-art alignment techniques (e.g., RLHF, RLAIF, Constitutional AI) specifically tailored for LLMs CoT, agentic workflows and multi-step reasoning.

• Reverse-engineer on neural networks to understand internal workings of AI models rather than treating them as "black boxes". Implement and integrate AI explainbility techniques and tools.

• Develop data attribution methods to quantify the influence of specific data points (text and image) on a model's prediction and implement solution.

• Build rigorous benchmarks and datasets to measure the quality of reasoning capabilities and reliability, quality of user-centric explanations, model transparency, and effectiveness of treatments.

• Develop robust defenses against jailbreaking, prompt injections, and adversarial exploits that target a model’s planning and tool-use capabilities.

• Communicate insights to stakeholders.

• Turn cutting-edge AI detections and AI safety papers into high-performance, scalable code, transforming theoretical breakthroughs into production-ready tools and frameworks.

Requirements:

• Ph.D. in Computer Science, Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Mathematics or other related fields.

• Focused on research in the AI field with good track records and high motivation in Explainable AI and Safety domain.

• Strong proficiency in Large Language Models (LLMs)/VLM, neural networks, neuro-symbolic AI, graph reasoning architectures.

• Strong background in Python, Java, or C++, with deep knowledge of ML frameworks such as PyTorch, TensorFlow.

• Successful experience in AI alignment to human values and expectations, model robustness improvement, controlled and continual learning, neural network interpretability and editing techniques is highly valued.

• Pioneering novel methods and neural networks that revolutionized machine learning or the AI field, or revolutionized the industry, is a big bonus.

• Strong publication record in top conferences (i.e. NeurIPS/ICLR/ICML/ AAAI/ACL/CVPR/ICCV/EMNLP/NAACL).

• Candidates with ICPC, IOI/IMO, IOAI and other international competition in computer science, machine learning, and AI, etc. are highly preferred.

• Good teamwork, enjoy working with multi‑culture teams, passionate in challenging the status quo.

Contract Type and starting date

This is a full-time permanent employee position. We expect you to start as soon as possible and job will be filled as soon as suitable candidate has found.

Why join us?

Join a high‑caliber lab: Work in our Cloud Content Security Lab in Ruoholahti, Helsinki, alongside experienced international researchers and engineers in a focused environment that values scientific excellence, depth, and real impact to protect millions of Huawei Mobile users.

You’ll enjoy access to extensive occupational healthcare, employee perks including culture & sports and phone benefits, team-building events and celebrations, employee recognition through awards and gifts, and daily office breakfasts and snacks. e are a team of multinational background, creating a unique working environment for developing imaging technologies.