System Security Research Engineer – OS and Device Protection

Huawei Canada has an immediate permanent opening for a System Security Research Engineer.

About the team:
The Digital Trust Lab is dedicated to ensuring user data flows while maintaining privacy. Researchers focus on key areas such as user identity authentication, data integrity, privacy protection, extensive model privacy assessment, multi-modal data identification, differential privacy, and federated learning. The lab supports deep research and encourages publications in leading journals. Research outcomes are applied across various Huawei product lines, including mobile phones, smart devices, and communications technologies.

About the job:

• Conduct research and prototyping of new security technologies to protect OS kernels, firmware, mobile systems, and devices.

• Analyze and understand advanced threat vectors, including memory corruption, privilege escalation, side-channel attacks, and firmware exploitation.

• Evaluate and build upon hardware-based protections such as Hypervisors, Trusted Execution Environments (TEE), and Secure Boot.

• Design innovative security features that improve isolation, access control, exploit resistance, or threat detection.

• Work closely with product teams to transition successful research into practical solutions and hardened products.

• Monitor and assess emerging vulnerabilities, industry trends, and academic advancements.

• Publish research, propose patents, or present at internal or external technical forums.

The total target annual compensation for this position ranges from $127,000 to $225,000 depending on education, experience, and demonstrated expertise.

Requirements

About the ideal candidate:

• PhD / Master’s degree or equivalent experience in Computer/Electrical Engineering or related fields, with a research mindset and 3+ years of industry-relevant R&D experience is an asset.

• Solid understanding of operating system internals, including memory management, process scheduling, and kernel/user separation.

• Proficiency in at least one native development language: C, C++, or Rust.

• Experience with low-level system programming and debugging.

• Familiarity with modern threat prevention technologies (sandboxing, CFI, ASLR, DEP, etc.).

• Strong grasp of memory safety concepts, including buffer overflows, use-after-free, and heap exploitation techniques.

• Knowledge of hardware security features, such as:

  • Virtualization (Hypervisors, VT-x/AMD-V)

  • TEE (e.g., ARM TrustZone, Intel SGX);

  • MMU, IOMMU, and Secure Boot processes

Additional Information:

Huawei Canada is committed to a fair, inclusive, and accessible recruitment process. If you require accommodation during any stage of the hiring process, please let us know and we will work with you to meet your needs.

All applications for this position are reviewed directly by our hiring team, we do not use artificial intelligence tools to screen or select candidates.