A pure quantum state of $n$ parties associated with the Hilbert space $\CC^{d_1}\otimes \CC^{d_2}\otimes\cdots\otimes \CC^{d_n}$ is called $k$-uniform if all the reductions to $k$-parties are maximally mixed. The $n$ partite system is called homogenous if the local dimension $d_1=d_2=\cdots=d_n$, while it is called heterogeneous if the local dimension are not all equal. $k$-uniform sates play an important role in quantum information theory. There are many progress in characterizing and constructing $k$-uniform states in homogeneous systems. However, the study of entanglement for heterogeneous systems is much more challenging than that for the homogeneous case. There are very few results known for the $k$-uniform states in heterogeneous systems for $k>3$. We present two general methods to construct $k$-uniform states in the heterogeneous systems for general $k$. The first construction is derived from the error correcting codes by establishing a connection between irredundant mixed orthogonal arrays and error correcting codes. We can produce many new $k$-uniform states such that the local dimension of each subsystem can be a prime power. The second construction is derived from a matrix $H$ meeting the condition that $H_{A\times \bar{A}}+H^T_{\bar{A}\times A}$ has full rank for any row index set $A$ of size $k$. These matrix construction can provide more flexible choices for the local dimensions, i.e., the local dimensions can be any integer (not necessarily prime power) subject to some constraints. Our constructions imply that for any positive integer $k$, one can construct $k$-uniform states of a heterogeneous system in many different Hilbert spaces.