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.

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. 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.

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.

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, behavior 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.

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.