Chief Scientist – Multimodal AI Systems

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:

• 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