Research Engineer-ML Systems & Compilers (Contractor)

Growing by reflection.

Huawei’s vision is a fully connected, intelligent world.

To achieve this, we work to inspire passion for basic research around the world.

Our combined passion drives development across the global innovation value chain.

Huawei has the largest Research and Development organization in the world with 96,000+ employees in research centers around the globe.

In the UK, we already have design centers in Cambridge, London, Edinburgh and Ipswich.

We continue to explore and define new research directions and new services.

We have expanded our collaborations with academic researchers; researched new network architectures, integration of communications and key enabling technologies; and developed the fundamental theories of these technologies.

We invite you to join us on this exciting journey and drive your career forward.

We are a CPU research team working where AI meets low-level systems.

We use LLMs, agents and reinforcement learning to optimise CPUs, operating system kernels, compilers and language runtimes on ARM64 platforms.

We are looking for an engineer who is comfortable writing a compiler pass, a JIT or interpreter fast path, and a training loop.

Ideally you have built at least one of those from scratch because you wanted to understand how it works.

• Design and train RL and LLM-based agents that discover and verify performance optimisations in kernels, language runtimes and compiler output.
• Build the infrastructure around those agents: reward design, sandboxed execution environments, benchmark harnesses, and verification that catches reward hacking.
• Write and optimise performance-critical code, such as compiler passes, interpreter and JIT hot paths, and runtime data structures, and measure it rigorously on real hardware.
• Turn research papers into working prototypes quickly, and turn strong prototypes into patents and publications.
• Work with CPU architects and kernel and compiler engineers to turn ML-driven insights into hardware-software co-design proposals.

This job description is only an outline of the tasks, responsibilities and outcomes required of the role.

The jobholder will carry out any other duties as may be reasonably required by his/her line manager.

The job description and personal specification may be reviewed on an ongoing basis in accordance with the changing needs of Huawei Research and Development UK Limited.

• BSc or MSc in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Strong C++ and Python.
• Hands-on experience in at least two of the following areas:

– compiler infrastructure (LLVM, MLIR, or a custom compiler)

– language runtimes (JIT compilers, interpreters, or dynamic language VMs such as V8, JavaScriptCore, PyPy, LuaJIT or the JVM)

– training or post-training models, including reinforcement learning (PPO, GRPO, or RLHF-style)

• Evidence of building a non-trivial system end-to-end. Examples include an open-source project, a language, a compiler, a runtime, or a tool you designed yourself.

• CPU microarchitecture knowledge: pipelines, branch prediction, caches and prefetching, and how software behaviour maps onto them.
• ARM64/AArch64 and NEON/SVE/SME; simulation with gem5 or QEMU.
• Dynamic language runtime internals: inline caches, hidden classes/shapes, tiered compilation, deoptimisation, garbage collection.
• MLIR dialects and custom lowering passes, or LLVM backend work (instruction selection, register allocation).
• Low-level kernel work in CUDA, Triton or SIMD intrinsics.
• Quantisation and efficient inference (INT4/FP8, GPTQ/AWQ, KV-cache management).
• RL environment design for multi-step, tool-using agents.
• Distributed training (DeepSpeed, Ray, NCCL).
• Publications, patents, or widely used open-source work.