Senior Researcher - AI Data Platforms

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

About the team

The Emerging Storage Lab is a research group based at Huawei Canada's Toronto Research Centre that is focused on next-generation data and storage technologies and innovations. Our team comprises graduate computer engineers and computer scientists with diverse industry experience, ranging from 0 to over 20 years. This lab investigates various data storage-related topics, including data management, data catalog, data fabric, file systems, storage networks, and AI storage, aiming to advance the field and drive data storage technological progress in the new AI era.

About the job

• Conduct applied research on next-gen AI data storage and retrieval systems, including vector-native data lakes, intelligent caching, and high-performance RAG infrastructure.
• Pioneer research in Agent memory systems, Knowledge Bases, and RAG-optimized intelligence, driving innovation in hybrid search, dynamic indexing, chunking/parsing, and real-time context freshness at petabyte scale.
• Design and implement data, metadata, and pipeline components with robust lineage, versioning, and lifecycle management, prototyping unified architectures for file storage, data lakes, and vector indexes.
• Optimize the data plane for distributed shuffling, fast checkpointing, model/KV Cache loading/offloading, and low-latency metadata serving for billion-scale entities.
• Develop system software integrating AI storage, data preparation, and orchestration frameworks (Ray, Kubernetes, Slurm), eliminating bottlenecks from curation to serving.
• Optimize end-to-end data paths from persistent storage to compute nodes, leveraging NVMe, RDMA, networking, prefetching, and async I/O to meet enterprise AI demands.
• Publish influential research on Agent Memory, RAG, and AI-native data management at top-tier conferences, and contribute to patents and industry forums.
• Collaborate with global research and engineering teams on architecture reviews, performance optimizations, and execution of the strategic roadmap.

The total target annual compensation for this position ranges from $127,000 - $225,000 depending on education, experience, and demonstrated expertise.