System Security Research Engineer – OS and Device Protection

Huawei Canada has an immediate 12- month contract opening for a System Security Research Engineer.

About the team:
The Data and Privacy Protection Technology Lab is dedicated to ensuring user data flows while maintaining privacy. Researchers focus on key areas such as user identity authentication, data integrity, privacy protection, extensive model privacy assessment, multi-modal data identification, differential privacy, and federated learning. The lab supports deep research and encourages publications in leading journals. Research outcomes are applied across various Huawei product lines, including mobile phones, smart devices, and communications technologies.

About the job:

• Conduct research and prototyping of new security technologies to protect OS kernels, firmware, mobile systems, and devices.

• Analyze and understand advanced threat vectors, including memory corruption, privilege escalation, side-channel attacks, and firmware exploitation.

• Evaluate and build upon hardware-based protections such as Hypervisors, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), and Secure Boot.

• Design innovative security features that improve isolation, access control, exploit resistance, or threat detection.

• Work closely with product teams to transition successful research into practical solutions and hardened products.

• Monitor and assess emerging vulnerabilities, industry trends, and academic advancements.

• Publish research, propose patents, or present at internal or external technical forums

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD / Master’s degree or equivalent experience in computer / electrical engineering or related fields, with a research mindset and preferably with 3+ years of industry-relevant R&D experience.

• Solid understanding of operating system internals, including memory management, process scheduling, and kernel/user separation.

• Proficiency in at least one native development language: C, C++, or Rust.

• Experience with low-level system programming and debugging.

• Familiarity with modern threat prevention technologies (sandboxing, CFI, ASLR, DEP, etc.).

• Strong grasp of memory safety concepts, including buffer overflows, use-after-free, and heap exploitation techniques.

• Knowledge of hardware security features, such as:

  • Virtualization (Hypervisors, VT-x/AMD-V)

  • TEE (e.g., ARM TrustZone, Intel SGX);

  • MMU, IOMMU, and Secure Boot processes