Senior Principal Researcher - AI Data Platform

About the Team

The Emerging Storage Lab, located at Huawei Canada's Toronto Research Centre, focuses on pioneering innovations in next-generation data and storage technologies. The team is composed of graduate engineers and scientists with varied industry experience spanning from new professionals to veterans with over two decades in the field. Their research covers broad subjects including data management, cataloging, data fabric, file and storage systems, networked storage, and AI-centric storage technologies to push forward data storage technology in the emerging AI era.

Role Overview

This role entails crafting and steering a forward-looking research agenda aimed at AI-native data platforms. This involves cutting-edge work on vector-native data lakes, intelligent caching mechanisms, and high-efficiency retrieval systems tailored for large language models (LLMs) and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) contexts.

The researcher will break new ground in Agent memory systems, Knowledge Bases, and RAG-centric data intelligence, contributing significantly to Data-Centric AI. Core responsibilities include innovating dynamic data indexing techniques, integrating hybrid search modalities combining semantics and keywords, developing smart chunking and parsing mechanisms, and ensuring real-time freshness in context data.

The position requires designing and prototyping advanced architectures that seamlessly integrate file storage, data lakes, and low-latency vector indices into an AI-optimized data infrastructure. Producing high-impact research papers at prestigious conferences (such as VLDB, SIGIR, NeurIPS, SIGMOD) and securing patents for pioneering concepts form vital parts of the work.

The individual will also serve as a thought leader and ambassador for the company, engaging with both academia and industry through talks and collaborations. Partnership with product developers and engineers is essential to bring research innovations to market-ready solutions, ensuring measurable impact. Mentoring junior researchers and doctoral interns to nurture a collaborative, high-performance research culture is also expected.

Candidate Profile

The ideal applicant holds a doctoral degree in Computer Science, Information Retrieval, Data Management, or a related discipline. They bring a minimum of three years of focused research experience in data systems, information retrieval, or AI/ML infrastructure fields and demonstrate a strong publication record in top-level venues such as VLDB, SIGIR, NeurIPS, SIGMOD, or ICDE.

Expertise should encompass key challenges in AI Data Platforms including tuning hybrid search systems, maintaining index freshness, managing vector space multi-tenancy, and balancing cost against latency.

Hands-on familiarity with unstructured data processing, enriching metadata, and experience using vector database technologies like Milvus or Pinecone, or data lake platforms such as Databricks or Snowflake, is required.

Superior communication skills are essential to effectively convey complex research ideas to both scholarly and industry communities. The candidate should have demonstrated success in influencing their domain through scholarly output, patents, and collaborative, cross-disciplinary teamwork.

Additional Information

Huawei Canada values a recruitment process that is fair, inclusive, and accessible. Candidates needing accommodations during hiring stages are encouraged to request assistance to ensure their needs are met.

The company commits to a direct and human-reviewed application evaluation process without reliance on artificial intelligence screening tools.