ML Engineer, Character Models [Diffusion] - Hapiko

Spin Master; City of Albany (NY); On-site; USD 96,000 - 128,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Growth opportunities

Flexible work hours

Comprehensive benefits

Other fun perks

Job summary

Spin Master Hapiko is seeking a hands-on ML engineer to build and tune diffusion models for a kid-friendly sticker printer. You will work on data pipelines, model evaluation, and cross-team collaboration to ensure on-brand, high-quality outputs for characters.

The role involves working with brand teams, production deployment, and a focus on safety for children from day one, with a collaborative, fast-paced startup-like environment within Spin Master’s global toy company framework.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience fine-tuning diffusion or other generative image models.
• Experience building training data pipelines with real provenance requirements.
• Experience building evals for generative outputs and using them to drive decisions.
• Strong software engineering in Python; training code and pipelines should be runnable and trustworthy.
• Curiosity and willingness to get creative to pioneer the future of play.

Responsibilities

• Train and fine-tune diffusion models, pipelines, and adapters for characters.
• Extend evaluation harness to measure character fidelity and output quality.
• Ensure a kid's spoken request for a character yields the correct outputs.
• Collaborate with brand teams for character approvals and shipping.
• Partner with ML Serving and Trust Safety engineers to productionize new products.

Skills

Hands-on diffusion fine-tuning

Training data pipelines

Generative evals

Python software engineering

Curiosity & creativity

Tools

Python

Diffusion models

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, which means we pair our small, senior engineering team with the reach of one of the world's largest toy companies to pioneer the future of play.

What will you work on?

You'll build and tune the models and pipelines that let kids make stickers of the characters they love. We're a small team building a first-of-its-kind product and scaling it globally, and Spin Master's portfolio of well-known characters is next. Your job is to bring them to Stickerbox: on-model, approved by brand teams, and great-looking on a small thermal printer.

This is a hands-on model role. You'll train and fine-tune models, build the data and evaluation behind them, and work closely with brand teams on what "on-model" means for each character.

How will you create impact?

• Train and fine-tune diffusion models, pipelines, and adapters for characters.
• Extend our evaluation harness to measure character fidelity alongside overall output quality.
• Make sure a kid's spoken request for a character reliably produces the right outputs
• Work with brand teams to get characters approved and shipped.
• Partner with our ML Serving engineer to get new products into production, and with our Trust Safety engineer so they're safe for kids from day one.

What are your skills and experience?

• Hands-on experience fine-tuning diffusion or other generative image models.
• You’ve built training data pipelines with real provenance requirements.
• You’ve built evals for generative output and used them to make decisions.
• Strong software engineering in Python: your training code and pipelines are something others can run and trust.
• Curiosity and a willingness to get creative and help us pioneer the future of play.

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.