Chief Scientist - Foundation Models

Job description

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Chief Scientist.

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:

• Set the scientific strategy and long-term vision for foundation models (LLMs and multimodal models), including a multi-year roadmap with clear milestones, investment priorities, and success metrics.

• Lead research excellence at scale: recruit, mentor, and retain top scientific talent; establish rigorous standards for experimentation, evaluation, reproducibility, and model governance.

• Drive breakthrough innovation in model architecture, training at scale, data strategy, optimization/efficiency, inference, evaluation, and alignment—balancing frontier exploration with reliable deployment.

• Own the end-to-end research portfolio: prioritize bets across exploratory research, applied research, and enabling platform capabilities; review progress, unblock teams, and ensure high-impact delivery.

• Translate research into real-world impact by partnering with engineering and product leaders to deliver production-grade foundation model capabilities (performance, cost, latency, safety, reliability).

• Establish technical authority and thought leadership through publications, invited talks, patents, and community engagement (where appropriate), raising the company’s scientific profile.

• Advise executives on AI decisions: provide clear guidance on technical trade-offs, risk, governance, and strategic opportunities; shape build/partner decisions and due diligence for collaborations.

• Build external partnerships with top universities, research labs, and ecosystem partners to accelerate progress and strengthen recruiting and visibility.

Job requirements

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD in ML/AI/CS or related field, or equivalent demonstrated scientific leadership and impact.

• Internationally recognized track record in foundation models, demonstrated by sustained contributions in top-tier venues (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP, CVPR) and/or widely adopted systems, benchmarks, or open-source work.

• Deep technical mastery of foundation models, including large-scale training, data curation, evaluation methodologies, alignment and safety, inference optimization, and deployment constraints.

• Proven senior leadership: experience leading principal-level researchers and multiple teams; ability to set direction, raise standards, and deliver through others.

• Demonstrated research-to-production capability: history of turning novel ideas into robust systems with measurable business and user impact.

• Strong communication and executive presence: able to represent the company externally and influence internally across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience in industry research labs or large-scale ML engineering environments is an asset.

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.