Research Engineer: AI CPU Architecture; Contractor

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 help 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.

• 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.

We are seeking an ambitious Research Engineer to work at the intersection of machine learning and CPU microarchitecture on the Kirin CPU Team at Huawei R&D UK (Cambridge). You will use reinforcement learning, LLM agents and learned models to discover and validate improvements for next-generation out-of-order CPU cores, including agentic systems that turn research papers into simulated, measured results. This role suits someone early in their career who is equally comfortable in a cycle-accurate simulator and a training loop, and who has built systems from scratch because they wanted to understand how they work.

• Build RL, Bayesian and LLM-agent-driven design-space exploration over gem5 and cycle-accurate models, using fast simulation for broad search and detailed models to validate the shortlisted candidates.
• Develop agentic pipelines that read architecture papers, implement the proposed mechanisms in simulators, run experiments and verify results, including the reward design, sandboxing and checks that catch invalid or…