Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Senior Principal Researcher. About the job:- Define and drive the end-to-end vision for next-generation AI agent-native multimodal interaction systems. Define how agents perceive, reason, and act through multimodal signals (voice, vision, touch, context).
- Design interaction models centered on agent autonomy and collaboration, moving beyond traditional GUI/VUI toward intent-driven and context-aware experiences.
- Lead the design of seamless multimodal experiences across platforms (e.g., mobile, automotive, wearables, smart environments), ensuring consistency and adaptability.
- Lead the integration of multimodal foundation models (VLM, multimodal LLMs) into real-world interaction systems.
- Lead the design of seamless multimodal experiences across: Mobile, AI PC, automotive, AI glasses, wearable devices, and smart environments.
- Iterate quickly from concept to production-ready solutions, evaluating usability, latency, feedback loops, and real-world behavior prior to production.
- Identify opportunities to unify interaction frameworks across modalities, reducing fragmentation between voice, visual, and physical interfaces.
- Drive end-to-end experience thinking, from perception and reasoning to response and user feedback, rather than isolated component optimization.
- Stay at the forefront of industry trends (e.g., AI agents, multimodal foundation models, embodied AI) and translate them into product innovations and high-value IP / patents.
About the ideal candidate:- PhD or Master degree in Computer Science (HCI, AI, Computing System), Electrical Engineering, or a related field.
- Strong understanding of multimodal AI systems, including how perception (audio, vision, other sensing modalities) and MM language models interact in real-world applications.
- Experience designing or shipping AI-driven user experiences (e.g., voice assistants, copilots, agents, or multimodal interfaces) at scale.
- Ability to think beyond existing paradigms (e.g., GUI, VUI) and define new interaction models enabled by AI.
- Hands-on experience with Multimodal LLMs or Vision-Language Models and Real-world applications of foundation models in interaction systems.
- Familiarity with the end-to-end stack of intelligent systems (perception 12 reasoning 12 action), even if not specializing in a single component.
- Strong product intuition and user-centric thinking, with the ability to balance technical feasibility and experience quality.
- Proven track record of delivering innovative interaction experiences to large-scale consumer products, or equivalent impact through influential research (publications at CHI, UIST, NeurIPS, InterSpeech, ICASSP, ICLR, or similar venues).
- Excellent cross-functional communication skills, able to align engineering, design, and research stakeholders.
Additional Information:All applications for this position are reviewed directly by our hiring team,
we do not use artificial intelligence tools to screen or select candidates.
