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 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 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, fundraising, and our values.

The Opportunity

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 co-develop visual rewrites with me (Ben, CEO). You'll also encode our patterns into AI tooling so the design system scales to every project automatically.
This is a great job for someone obsessive about UX and UI. I'm personally kept up at night by small interactions I don'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.

What you will need to be successful

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

• You have strong front-end engineering skills (TypeScript, React, SolidJS, CSS, animations)

• 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%

• 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