Chief Scientist – Multimodal AI Systems
If you are enthusiastic in shaping Huawei’s European Research Institute together with a multicultural team of leading researchers, this is the right opportunity for you!
About Huawei
Huawei is a global leader in information and communications technology (ICT), building the digital and intelligent infrastructure that powers more than 170 countries and regions and serves over one-third of the world’s population. With more than 180,000 employees, Huawei invests heavily in fundamental research, system architecture, and long-term technological leadership.
Huawei’s Research Centers in Lausanne and Zurich are core pillars of the company’s global research network, responsible for defining the evolution of computer architecture and AI systems that will underpin the next generation of intelligent platforms.
We are launching a new Computer Architecture Innovation Lab in Switzerland with a single mission:
to define how multimodal AI systems will be built, trained, and deployed at planetary scale over the next decade.
We are seeking a Chief Scientist to provide scientific and architectural leadership for Huawei’s multimodal AI platform. This role is responsible for setting the technical vision, driving long-term research programs, and ensuring tight co-design between models, software infrastructure, and hardware.
This is not an execution role.
It is a technology leadership mandate.
The Chief Scientist will:
Define the architectural roadmap for large multimodal foundation models
Guide the evolution of training, inference, and deployment platforms
Influence Huawei’s hardware–software co-design strategy
Shape Huawei’s position in the global AI research and open-source ecosystem
Scientific & Technical Scope
The role spans the full multimodal AI stack:
Vision–Language Models, Video Models, and Multimodal Agents
Transformers, Diffusion Models, and Large Multimodal Model (LMM) architectures
Large-scale training, inference, and serving systems
Memory, KV-cache, scheduling, and performance-critical AI infrastructure
The Chief Scientist will define:
How multimodal models are architected
How they are trained and served at scale
How they map onto Huawei’s computing platforms
Ecosystem and Open Innovation Leadership
We expect the Chief Scientist to be an external technical authority as well as an internal leader.
This includes:
Influencing and steering major open-source AI ecosystems (e.g., Transformers, LLaVA, OpenMMLab, Diffusers, multimodal and video frameworks)
Establishing Huawei as a first-class contributor and thought leader
Building global research and engineering communities around Huawei’s platforms
Research & Thought Leadership
The ideal candidate has:
A strong track record of shaping research agendas in top venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, CVPR, ICCV, ACL, EMNLP, etc.)
A history of inventing architectures and systems, not just improving existing ones
The ability to translate research into industry-defining platforms
Profile
PhD 10+ years of experience in AI, systems, or computer architecture
Recognized authority in at least one of:
Multimodal AI
Large-scale model systems
AI infrastructure or hardware–software co-design
Strong ability to operate across research, engineering, and corporate strategy
Excellent communication and technical leadership in English
- Department
- Computing Product Line
- Locations
- Zürich, Lausanne
- Employment type
- Full-time
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