hotplate

Design Engineer

San Francisco Office
Full-time
$180K - $220K
Posted Aug 21, 2026

Job description

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've supported 7,000 businesses generating $100M+ in sales, many of whom are the top pop ups in the country recognized by the New York Times, James Beard, Infatuation, Eater, etc., and 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.

THE ROLE

As Hotplate's first design engineer, you'll own how Hotplate looks, feels and works for thousands of chefs and millions of customers.

We have a design system and reusable components, but building a clean UI for most projects, and taking the time to think it through, is still one of the biggest slowdowns in shipping features. 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

•Be a thought partner for engineers on what the UI for their features should look like

•Co-develop visual rewrites with Ben, our CEO

•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 person 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 skills: TypeScript, React, Tailwind, animation

•You have an eye for design details, care deeply about craft, and sweat every word and interaction

•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 prototype ideas in hours, not days

•You think in systems and 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 every day, and keep testing new ones to see what's worth bringing into how Hotplate designs and builds

•2 to 3 years minimum 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.

Useful first. Solve real problems for chefs and their customers. Then make it feel effortless.

Own all of it. Shape the feature, design it, ship it. Product, design, code, copy, support, whatever it needs.

Know the tradeoffs. Understand the chef, the customer, the code and the business before picking a solution.

Build for every chef. A first time home baker and a chef doing thousands of orders should both feel at home. Keep the advanced stuff there when people need it, not in their way.

Small and excellent. Scope small enough to do it well. Push back when craft, speed or trust is at risk.

Make the team better. Kind, direct, low ego. Share work early. When you give the same feedback twice, fix it at the source.

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 always thinking about how to 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 in prod, it isn't done.

•You need a design team around you. You'll be our first design engineer, and for now the only one.

•You want big, splashy redesigns. Most of the work is sweating the small interactions chefs and their customers touch every day.

•You stop at 90%. We care about the last 10%: loading, empty and error states, edge cases, and the details most people skip.

•You want close, day to day mentorship. You'll work closely with Ben early on, but you should want to own UX decisions on your own within your 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.