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 OpportunityAs 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.
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
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.
Skills Required
- Proficiency with Figma and code editors
- Strong front-end engineering skills with TypeScript, React, SolidJS, CSS, and animations
- Strong eye for design details and commitment to product craft
- Experience shipping polished products
- Ability to prototype ideas quickly
- Ability to design systems and build reusable, maintainable UI components
- Interest in AI and new interaction paradigms
What We Do
Running a food business is hard, too hard. About 2/3 of brick and mortar restaurants and bakeries fail within their first year, putting these types of businesses in the same risk category as startups. It is insane that that is the case. However, during COVID, as people were stuck at home, a new model for selling food emerged: people making and selling food in their home through social media via pre-order pickup. These new businesses opened pre-orders for a brief period at the beginning of the week and had their customers come to pickup their food at the end of the week. This seemingly small change has massive implications. By running on a pre-order pickup model, these chefs and bakers solved many of the problems traditional brick and mortars faced: - No ingredient waste or need to forecast demand. - Significantly less labor needed, a single creator can take the orders, make them, and hand them off to the customer over the course of the week. - No need for an expensive lease: customers can pickup from the creator's house or a local business they partner with. - Zero startup cost, anyone can start small and organically grow without needing to invest over $100,000 to start a traditional brick and mortar. As we saw this trend develop, we spoke to the people behind these businesses and found out that many of them were making upwards of 50% margins on their food sales, 10x the average of 5% for a standard brick and mortar. However, there was one big problem: no product existed to sell food this way. These businesses were taking orders via DMs, Google Sheets, or hacking the functionality of a Square or Ecommerce website to post their sales. They were spending most of their time trying to organize orders, remind customers about pickups, chasing down venmo payments, and tabulating spreadsheets. They were hitting a glass ceiling. By building the foundational tool for this new model, we have the opportunity to fundamentally change the food industry for the better.
