Formal Methods Research Engineer Intern, Automated Reasoning

About the Role

We are looking for a FM Research Engineer PhD Intern to work on automated reasoning and formal verification for cloud policies and configurations. Join us to push the boundaries of what’s possible in ensuring correctness, safety, and security of policies, rules, and configurations across Huawei Cloud. In this role, you won’t be just writing code, you will be applying automation and rigorous mathematical techniques to detect misconfigurations that can impact system-wide safety and security, verify critical properties, and ensure that intended configurations are deployed into production.

As part of our automated reasoning focus, you’ll tackle key expressivity and scalability challenges around policy verification, constraint solving, performance optimization, configuration safety, and build complex systems that can automatically and statically analyze these to identify issues pre-deployment.

Responsibilities

·        Design and implement SMT-based encodings for verifying correctness properties of cloud policies, access control policies, networking rules, and configurations

·        Develop and optimize automated techniques to detect misconfigurations, policy violations, and security vulnerabilities in cloud systems

·        Build performance analysis and optimization strategies for SMT solvers and constraint solvers applied to large-scale policy and configuration verification

·        Investigate and implement novel constraint solving approaches for existing theories

·        Collaborate with cloud teams to understand real-world configuration challenges and translate them into formal verification problems

·        Contribute to tools that can be used by cloud engineers to verify their policies, configurations, and system specifications

·        Write well-documented verification artifacts, technical reports, and contribute to knowledge sharing within the team

Requirements

·        Currently pursuing a PhD in Computer Science, Automated Reasoning, Logic, Formal Verification, or related field

·        Strong programming skills in at least one language like Rust, Go, C++, Java, Python, or similar

·        Experience with SMT/SAT solvers (e.g., Z3, CVC5, and string solvers such as Ostrich and Z3-Noodler)

·        Understanding of logic, constraint solving, reasoning, configuration management

·        Excellent problem solving, communication, and collaboration skills

Nice to Have

·        Familiarity with constraint programming or logic programming (ASP, Prolog)

·        Solid understanding of cloud configuration policies (e.g., access control policies, infrastructure-as-code, networking rules, etc.)

·        Previous work on static analysis, configuration verification, or security analysis

What You'll Gain

This internship offers hands-on experience with applied formal methods and automated reasoning to real-world cloud policy and configuration management. You’ll work closely with expert researchers who will guide you through complex technical problems in verification and automated static analysis. The role offers valuable exposure to state-of-the-art SMT solving and practical configuration management at scale. This experience will provide you with skills in rigorous engineering and practical applications of automated reasoning to business-critical and customer-facing cloud systems. You will have the opportunity to collaborate with teams across Europe and China, and to contribute to academic publications.

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