Senior Engineer - LLM for SE

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a Senior Engineer.

About the team:

The Centre for Software Excellence Lab conducts pioneering research in software engineering, focusing on next-generation technologies. This team integrates industry best practices with cutting-edge academic research to address lifecycle software engineering challenges, including foundation model applications, software performance engineering, hyper-cluster programming, next-gen mobile OS, and cloud-native computing. This lab uniquely allows researchers to apply innovations directly to products affecting billions of customers while promoting open-source contributions, publications, conference participation, and collaborations to create a broader impact.

About the job:

• Conceptualize, design, and conduct original research on applying and enhancing LLMs for various software engineering tasks (e.g., code generation, program repair, automated testing, requirements analysis, code summarization, vulnerability detection).

• Develop novel algorithms, models, techniques, and frameworks to improve the software engineering capabilities of LLMs, focusing on aspects like reliability, controllability, interpretability, and efficiency.

• Design and implement rigorous experimental evaluations to validate research hypotheses and benchmark new approaches against the state-of-the-art.

• Author and publish high-impact research papers in leading software engineering conferences (e.g., ICSE, FSE, ASE) and journals (e.g., TSE, TOSEM), as well as relevant AI/ML venues.

• Collaborate with other researchers and engineers to translate research findings into prototypes, tools, or impactful contributions to the field.

• Stay abreast of the latest advancements in LLMs, deep learning, natural language processing, and software engineering research.

• Present research findings at internal forums, academic conferences, and workshops.

• Contribute to the broader research community through activities such as peer review, open-sourcing code/datasets, and mentoring junior researchers (if applicable).

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD/Master in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a closely related field.

• Demonstrated strong publication record in premier software engineering conferences and journals (e.g., ICSE, FSE, ASE, TSE, TOSEM) specifically on topics related to LLMs for Software Engineering (LLM4SE), or improving the software engineering capabilities of LLMs.

• Publications in top-tier AI/ML conferences (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, EMNLP) with direct applicability to SE are also highly valued.

• Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX) and associated MLOps tools, familiary with running experiments on large scale distributed clusters with frameworks like Ray, openRLHF, veRL.

• Deep understanding of Large Language Models, including their architectures (e.g., Transformers), training/fine-tuning techniques (e.g., pre-training, instruction tuning, RLHF), prompting strategies, and evaluation methodologies.

• Proficiency in programming languages commonly used in ML/SE research (e.g., Python).

• Strong analytical, problem-solving, and critical thinking skills, with the ability to conduct independent research.

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to clearly articulate complex technical ideas and research findings.

• A passion for innovation and a drive to make significant research contributions at the intersection of LLMs and Software Engineering.