Senior+ Data Scientist - ML & Image Generation

Hapiko is a Brooklyn-based company building the future of play, focused on creating safe, hands-on AI experiences for children. They are seeking a Senior Data Scientist to optimize their ML pipeline for an AI-powered voice-to-sticker printer, responsible for model training, data quality, and ML optimization.

Responsibilities:

• Build and curate large-scale image datasets for training custom models
• Design annotation pipelines and data quality processes
• Analyze training runs and model outputs to guide iteration
• Work with our team to define what to train on and how to evaluate it
• Optimize our transcription pipeline for accuracy and latency
• Improve image generation quality, prompt adherence, and consistency
• Identify bottlenecks and failure modes across the pipeline
• Run experiments and A/B tests to measure improvements
• Refine content safety systems for child-appropriate outputs, and develop new ones
• Build on our evaluation datasets for safety edge cases
• Analyze moderation performance and reduce false positives/negatives
• Stay current on best practices for AI safety in generative systems
• Build evaluation frameworks to measure model performance at scale
• Define metrics that correlate with user satisfaction (aesthetic quality, relevance, safety)
• Develop automated evaluation pipelines (LLM-as-judge, CLIP scores, human eval)
• Track experiments and communicate findings to the team
• Optimize prompts for transcription accuracy and image generation quality
• Develop systematic approaches to prompt testing and iteration
• Build prompt templates and guidelines for different use cases