Backend Platform Engineer - Hapiko

Spin Master; New York (NY); On-site; USD 137,000 - 182,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Growth opportunities

Flexible work hours

Comprehensive benefits

Fun perks

Job summary

Spin Master’s Hapiko team is seeking a backend engineer to own real-time connections, API, job pipeline and cloud infrastructure for a first-of-its-kind sticker printer. You will scale systems, harden foundations, and set coding and deployment standards as the team grows.

You’ll work end-to-end on autoscaling, observability, cost instrumentation, release engineering, and safety/privacy for a kids’ product, partnering with firmware, ML, and trust-safety engineers to deliver fast, reliable

Qualifications

• Experience owning production infrastructure end to end.
• Scaled a queue-driven or real-time system through traffic growth.
• Experience with real-time connections between devices.
• Strong in Python and PostgreSQL.
• Willingness to learn Elixir.

Responsibilities

• Own the API and job queues used by sticker requests.
• Maintain healthy real-time device connections.
• Tune autoscaling for holiday spikes and collaborate on GPU inference.
• Improve observability with metrics, logs, tracing and alerts.
• Develop cost instrumentation to track per-request costs.
• Own release engineering for server-side services including migrations and rollback.
• Collaborate on abuse prevention and device security for a kids' product.
• Participate in on-call rotations to reduce incidents.

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

Elixir

Infra ownership

Real-time systems

Job description

Are you a kid at heart looking to build a career with a leading global children's toy, entertainment and digital gaming company?

At Spin Master, our unwavering commitment to open mindedness, integrity and innovation is a great part of what has made us an industry leader. How do we stay ahead of the pack? By hiring the best and brightest minds—and that’s why we want you!

Job Description

About Hapiko

Hapiko makes Stickerbox, a voice-activated sticker printer for kids. A child says whatever they can imagine, and seconds later it's a real sticker in their hand. Hapiko is a Spin Master company, so we pair a small, senior engineering team with the reach of one of the world's largest toy companies.

What will you work on?

You’ll own everything behind that moment: the real-time connection layer, the API, the job pipeline and the cloud infrastructure every device talks to. We're a small team building a first-of-its-kind product and scaling it globally, and the backend has to stay fast, safe for kids and affordable as we grow.

This is a hands‑on, end‑to‑end ownership role. The foundations are in place. Your job is to harden them, scale them and set the standards others follow as the team grows.

How will you create impact?

• Own the API and job queues that every sticker request runs through.
• Keep the real‑time connection layer that devices rely on healthy and reliable, partnering with our firmware engineer.
• Tune and extend autoscaling so the system handles holiday spikes and a growing fleet, partnering with our ML Serving engineer on GPU inference.
• Mature our observability: metrics, logs, tracing and alerts that tell us what's wrong before families do.
• Build cost instrumentation so we can see what each request, model and service actually costs.
• Own release engineering for server‑side services, including safe deploys, database migrations and fast rollback.
• Partner with our Trust Safety engineer on abuse prevention, device security and privacy for a kids' product.
• Share on‑call and make the rotation quieter over time.

What are your skills and experience?

• Depth in Python and PostgreSQL.
• Elixir experience, or real interest in learning it.
• You’ve owned production infrastructure end to end, not just written code that runs on it.
• You’ve scaled a queue‑driven or real‑time system through an order of magnitude of traffic growth.
• You’re comfortable being paged for systems you own, and you work to make that happen less.

The anticipated pay range for candidates who will work in Ontario is $136,700 to $182,300 Per Annum. The offered pay to a successful candidate will be dependent on several factors that may include but are not limited to years of experience within the job, years of experience within the required industry, education, etc. Spin Master Inc. is a multi‑state employer, and this salary range may not reflect positions that work only in other states.

This job posting is tied to an open vacancy.

What You Can Expect From Us

Our mission is to Make Life More Fun with a vision to push the boundaries of innovation, creativity, and fun.

• Growth and Career Opportunities
• Flexible Work Hours
• Innovation, Collaboration and Fun
• Comprehensive Benefits
• Other fun Perks!

What’s it like to work here?

Spin Master is a fast‑paced, hands‑on organization that provides many great opportunities for impactful decision‑making; though our challenging start‑up atmosphere isn’t for everyone, we have a proven record of opportunities for future advancement and internal transfers for our passionate and results driven team.

Everyone is welcome in our sandbox and we are committed to an accessible and inclusive hiring process that provides reasonable accommodation to all applicants.

Spin Master strives to create an accessible and inclusive application and selection process and is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to job applicants who may require provisions to participate in the recruitment, selection and/or assessment processes. Should you require an accommodation, please contact our Talent Acquisition team, by email at [e-mail] or by phone [phone] and we will work with you to meet your accessibility needs.

Follow us on Instagram and Twitter @SpinMaster to stay up to date on Spin Master career opportunities.

We do appreciate all interest; however only those selected for interview will be contacted.