Backend Platform Engineer - Hapiko

Spin Master; United States; Remote; USD 98,000 - 130,000; Full time

Job summary

Spin Master, the creator behind Hapiko’s Stickerbox, seeks a hands-on backend engineer to own the API, job queues, and real-time connections across a scalable cloud stack. You’ll partner with firmware, ML, and security teams to ensure fast, reliable, and affordable services for a kids’ product.

You’ll design for scale, instrument costs, and drive safe deployments with strong observability and on-call reliability. Remote-friendly posting with Ontario pay guidance.

Qualifications

• Must have hands-on production infrastructure experience.
• Strong Python and PostgreSQL background.
• Interest or experience in Elixir welcomed.
• Experience scaling queue-driven or real-time systems.

Responsibilities

• Own the API and job queues for sticker requests.
• Maintain and improve the real-time connection layer with firmware engineers.
• Tune autoscaling to handle holiday spikes and growing fleet.
• Develop observability with metrics, logs, tracing and alerts.
• Build cost instrumentation to measure per-request costs.
• Own release engineering for server-side services and migrations.
• Collaborate with Trust & Safety on security and privacy for a kids’ product.
• Share on‑call duties and reduce incidents over time.

Skills

Python

PostgreSQL

Elixir

Production infrastructure

Real-time systems

Job description

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.

#LI-Remote #LI-HM1

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 at 416 364-6002 and we will work with you to meet your accessibility needs.

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