Research Engineer - Robotics (Contractor) in London

About Huawei Research and Development UK Limited. Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have 207,000 employees and operate in over 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Our vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they’re at home, in the office, or on the go.

This spirit of innovation has led Huawei to work in close partnership with leading academic institutions in the UK to develop and refine the latest technologies. With a shared commitment to innovation and progress, both parties have worked together to achieve common goals and establish a strong partnership. The partnership between UK and Huawei helps to develop the technologies of the future that will transform the way we all communicate, work and live.

For the past 30 years we have maintained an unwavering focus, rejecting shortcuts and easy opportunities that don't align with our core business. With a practical approach to everything we do, we concentrate our efforts and invest patiently to drive technological breakthroughs.

This strategic focus is a reflection of our core values:

• Staying customer-centric
• Inspiring dedication
• Persevering
• 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.

Job Summary: Huawei is seeking exceptional candidates to pursue research in various aspects of robot learning (imitation/reinforcement learning), dynamics, and/or control for real robot systems (e.g. Fixed-base arm and legged robots). The successful applicant is expected to develop novel contributions allowing the field to move forward. Key research questions include but are not limited to real-robot deployment of embodied AI, behaviour synthesis from natural language, dynamic modelling and control, and world models for robotics. This is an exceptional opportunity for research while collaborating with a diverse team with backgrounds ranging from robotics, control/planning theory, reinforcement/imitation learning to mathematics, probability and game theory. These positions involve theoretical advances and aim to apply innovations in the real world. We aim to publish our work in top-tier conferences and journals, including but not limited to Science Robotics, TRO, ICRA, RSS, RAL, CoRL, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, Nature, and JMLR. Our goal is to contribute to an open and transparent research environment by regularly open-sourcing code of our novel discoveries.

Key Responsibilities:

• Develop high-impact research output in the field of robot learning (imitation/reinforcement learning), dynamics, and/or control for real robot systems.
• Write research-level code capable of testing novel ideas and new approaches.
• Effectively communicate research findings to the team and to the broader community through journal and conference publications.
• Aid in progressing research fields by open-sourcing code.

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.

Person Specification:

Required:

• PhD in Robotics, Machine Learning, Computer Science, or related field. Exceptional masters students who have experience working with real robots will be considered.
• Papers in top-tier conferences/journals, e.g. Science Robotics, TRO, ICRA, RSS, RAL, CoRL, ICML, ICLR, NeurIPS, Nature, and JMLR.
• Experience working with real robots.
• Strong understanding of robotics and machine learning.
• Strong programming skills in Python.
• Experience with PyTorch.

Desired:

• Experience with C++.
• Understanding of transformer architectures and attention mechanisms.
• Training and deploying RL policies on real systems.