The Problem & The Mission of Hotplate

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:

1. No ingredient waste or need to forecast demand.

2. 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.

3. No need for an expensive lease: customers can pickup from the creator's house or a local business they partner with.

4. 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: increasing the diversity and accessibility of food by making it possible for anyone to start a food business.

The Opportunity

As the frontend lead, you will be set the foundation of Hotplate's frontend architecture, UX, and UI for hundreds of thousands of customers and chefs and the next decade of our growth. Much of our frontend was built in the infancy of the company, and needs some foundational upgrades in its structure, style, and layout. In some areas, you will be codeveloping entire visual rewrites with me (Ben, CEO), establishing a design system, and refactoring the core functional architecture of our frontend. On top of that you will be ideating, designing, and developing dozens of new features for our product that help thousands of businesses. You will have no limitations to what you can do, and nothing will be holding you back to have unlimited impact in your role.

What you will need to be successful

• Strong experience in React

• Advanced understanding of React Context and global state management best practices

• A love for designing products and features from scratch

• Experience implementing full design systems and reusable component primitives

• A high bar for delivering clean, intuitive, UX experiences

• Get energy and excitement from refactoring old frontend architecture and redesigning them with your own vision

• Comfortable to work in the backend when needed to develop endpoints and basic logic to support your own development of new UI/UX

• Solid understanding of TailwindCSS, NextJS

• Have worked in early to mid stage startups before, with experience taking projects from 0 to 1 independently

Our Team & Culture

We are a lean team devoted to constantly learning and improving, and look for candidates that are extremely dedicated to pushing themselves outside their comfort zone to better themselves as contributors. This focus means that we often challenge each others ideas, voice concerns or feedback openly, fight for what we believe is the best solution to a problem, and push ourselves to work longer to deliver the best result on the timeline we set. With all that being said, we also have a very social work culture. The team often goes to concerts, hangs out after work, hosts happy hours, and goes on at least two full-team activities per month around the Bay Area. We rotate who controls the office music playlist, make community meals, and talk about our interests. In order for us to be comfortable healthily challenging each other and pushing each other to succeed, we have to have a connection. If you align with this, please apply!

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.