Applied AI Researcher – Multimodal Intelligence

Job description

Huawei Canada has an immediate 12-month contract opening for a Researcher. About the team: The Huawei Human-Machine Interaction Lab unites global researchers, engineers, and designers to redefine human technology relationships through user centered, hands on research. We focus on agentic AI and multimodal interaction (voice, touch, vision, gesture) across smartphones, wearables, and emerging devices—advancing agentic workflows, multi-agent orchestration, and intuitive human-AI interfaces. By tightly integrating sensing, algorithms, and systems, our prototype driven work ships directly to products, enabling seamless task delegation and human AI collaboration at scale. About the job: Research, prototype, and evaluate new AI/ML technologies for multimodal human-machine interaction across modalities such as speech/audio, vision, language, touch, gesture, motion, and other device sensors. Rapidly reproduce and extend promising approaches from recent research papers, opensource projects, and emerging AI technologies, and assess their applicability to real product scenarios. Design and implement models, algorithms, and experimental systems for problems such as multimodal perception, cross-modal fusion, context understanding, multimodal reasoning, and intelligent interaction. Train, fine-tune, adapt, or integrate machine learning and foundation models as needed, and develop practical prototypes that demonstrate their capabilities on real devices or representative platforms. Design rigorous experiments and evaluation methodologies to understand model quality, failure modes, robustness, latency, memory usage, and other product-relevant trade-offs. Work closely with researchers, engineers, designers, and product teams to identify promising interaction concepts and translate research results into compelling demonstrations and potential product solutions. Communicate research findings clearly through technical presentations, documentation, prototypes, and experimental results. Contribute to patents, publications, internal technology proposals, or other research outputs when appropriate. The total target annual compensation (based on 2,080 hours per year) ranges from $106,000 - $156,000 depending on education, experience, and demonstrated expertise. About the ideal candidate: Master’s or PhD degree in Computer Science, Electrical/Computer Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Statistics, Human-Computer Interaction, or a related field. Strong foundation in machine learning and deep learning, including hands-on experience developing and evaluating models using PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, or similar frameworks. Demonstrated research ability through graduate research, industry R&D, publications, patents, open-source contributions, or technically substantial projects. Publications at top-tier conferences (e.g., ICASSP, Interspeech, CVPR, CHI) and in leading journals are an asset. Strong programming skills in Python and the ability to independently develop, debug, and evaluate non-trivial research prototypes. Experience with C++, Java, or other system/application languages is an asset. Hands-on experience in at least one relevant area such as speech/audio processing, computer vision, video understanding, multimodal learning, NLP, generative AI, foundation models, HCI, or sensor-based interaction. Ability to understand recent research papers, reproduce technical approaches, design meaningful experiments, and critically analyze results rather than relying only on existing APIs. Strong analytical and problem-solving skills, including familiarity with experimental design, statistical evaluation, and systematic analysis of model failure cases. Ability to work effectively in a fast-moving research environment and turn ambiguous technical ideas into working prototypes. 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.