Design Engineer

ABOUT HOTPLATE

Hotplate exists to enable anyone to start and scale a local food business without a brick and mortar.

The traditional brick and mortar restaurant model is broken: it requires six figures in upfront capital https://pos.toasttab.com/blog/on-the-line/how-much-does-it-cost-to-open-a-restaurant and comes with high operating costs. Within their first year, 2/3 of all restaurants and bakeries close.

The next wave of food entrepreneurship is emerging. These chefs and bakers run businesses from home, commissary kitchens, or mobile pop-ups. They generate hype and buzz on Instagram and run almost entirely on pre-orders. The result is 50-80% profit margins, over 10x the traditional 5% margin https://www.restaurant365.com/blog/what-is-the-average-profit-margin-for-a-restaurant-2/#:~:text=Full%2Dservice%20restaurants%20(3%2D5%25)&text=With%20greater%20labor%20costs%2C%20FSR,%2C%20turnover%20rates%2C%20and%20location of a brick and mortar.

But today’s e-commerce tools weren’t built for this way of selling food. Without Hotplate, chefs and bakers hack together DMs, Google Forms, Square, and Shopify. They spend more time managing logistics than growing their business.

We support the top pop ups in the country, many of which are recognized by the New York Times, Infatuation, Eater, etc. and recently crossed 5,000 businesses and $80M paid out on the platform, but we're just getting started.

By building the foundational tool for this new model, we have the opportunity to fundamentally change the food industry for the better: increasing the diversity and accessibility of food by making it possible for anyone to start a food business.

If you want to read more to make sure Hotplate is a good fit, check out our philosophies on hiring https://www.notion.so/Hiring-Philosophy-f008f4f940e34a17b29c90b4d27b7e5a?pvs=21, fundraising https://www.notion.so/199ebe859bea446499968ee12ce7b1f7?pvs=21, and our values https://www.notion.so/Values-Mission-f3371eb51e9047238c66cd312e3660f0?pvs=21.

THE ROLE

As Hotplate's first design engineer, you'll own how the product looks and feels for thousands of chefs and millions of customers. We have a design system and reusable components, but developing a clean UI for most projects, and spending the time to think it through, is still one of the biggest slowdowns in feature development. You'll upgrade the design of what we've already built, keep it consistent as the product grows, design and build the UI for entirely new parts of Hotplate as we ship them, and be a thought partner for most of the engineers on what the UI for their features should look like. In some areas you'll codevelop visual rewrites with Ben, our CEO. You'll also encode our patterns into AI tooling so the design system scales to every project automatically.

We're also hiring a designer. Until they join, you'll be the go to thought partner for engineers on UI. Once they're here, you'll work alongside them and own the quality of UI implementation across the product.

This role is based in San Francisco, and we are 5 days a week in-person. We move fast.

WHAT YOU WILL NEED TO BE SUCCESSFUL

- You're equally comfortable in Figma and your code editor

- You have strong frontend engineering skills (TypeScript, React, Tailwind, animation, etc.)

- You have an eye for design details and care deeply about craft

- You've shipped polished products and know what it takes to get from 90% to 100%, down to pixel perfect execution and smooth interactions

- You can move fast, prototyping ideas in hours, not days

- You think in systems and can build reusable, maintainable UI components

- You're excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms

- You use AI design and coding tools in your workflow, and you're always exploring new ones, testing what's worth bringing into how Hotplate designs and builds

- 2 to 3 years minimum of experience across product design and frontend engineering

OUR PHILOSOPHY OF DESIGN

Every engineer at Hotplate owns their features end to end, so great design can't live with just one person. Part of this role is making a clean UI the easy default for everyone. We believe the little details are what make a product feel great.

This is a great job for someone obsessive about UX and UI. Ben, our CEO, is kept up at night by small interactions he doesn't have the time to act on. If you're obsessive in the same way and have a drive to constantly think about and improve them, you'll be very happy here.

OUR TEAM

We are a lean, mission driven team. We exist to enable the next million chefs and bakers to scale local food businesses outside the brick & mortar model.

We operate with high ownership, laser focus on the impact we have for our chefs and bakers, and commitment to take on projects that push us out of our comfort zones.

We’re a tight knit crew. We jam with a daily shared playlist, often hang for team lunch and happy hours, and always have snacks on the table (made by the team or a Hotplate Chef). We love working in a place where we all have a connection, and think it helps us work better as a team.

THIS ROLE PROBABLY ISN'T FOR YOU IF

- You'd rather hand off mockups than ship them. Here design and code are often the same job. If it isn't live in the product, it isn't done.

- You need a design team around you. You'll be our first design engineer, working directly with Ben, our CEO, early on and owning the quality of UI across the product.

- You're happiest on big, splashy redesigns. A lot of work is sweating the small interactions chefs and their customers touch every day.

- Your work tends to stop at 90%. We care about the last 10%: the loading, empty, and error states, the edge cases, and the details most people skip.

- You're looking for close, day to day mentorship. You'll work closely with Ben early on, but this role is for someone who wants to own UX decisions on their own within the first couple of months.

Those are all fine ways to work. They just aren't how Hotplate works.

BENEFITS

- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage for you and dependents

- 401(k) retirement plan

- Unlimited PTO (that people actually take)

- Monthly budget to spend on Hotplate

Hotplate is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate in hiring or any employment decision based on race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), marital status, ancestry, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, or other applicable legally protected characteristic.