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.

If you want to know more about Hotplate to know if its the right place for you, I encourage you to read our philosophy on hiring, fundraising, and our values

The Opportunity:

We are hiring a Head of Engineering who has had experience growing and working with teams from 0-50 who also has a desire to, for a while, stay hands on with Hotplate’s code as the team grows. You will have the opportunity to engage in planning across hiring, tech stack, product development, and mentoring our team members. If you have been around the block at another organization going from 0-1 and have a real desire to do it again from a position of leadership, this will be a great fit for you.

What you need: 

• Be an excellent people manager to lead a very autonomous & high ownership team

• Have a very strong technical background across our entire stack & a desire to continue to flex that muscle as our team and product grows, switching between manager and IC as needs arise

• Work closely with the CEO & other teams to help map out and plan for products goals in the short and long tem

• Establish and champion best practices, empowering the engineering team to deliver consistent and quality results without sacrificing time

• Help us refine the foundation of our development process as the team grows

• Help with high-level recruiting and hiring planning as we rapidly grow our team

• Feel excited to find problems proactively and fix them in the team and product

• Flexible and non-perscriptive, knowing “correct” can change and has in many different forms as we grow

• Humility and respect for the perspectives of all those working alongside them

Our philosophy of engineering

Hotplate's engineering team is small, and as we scale we want to keep it that way. Every engineer operates in a full stack capacity. Features are owned by individuals, so even though we all have our strengths, each of us pushes code to all layers of the app. We find this increases our velocity, results in better decision-making before and during feature development, and is a forcing function for us to grow as full stack contributors. If this is an environment in which you think you would thrive, we would love for you to 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.