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 role
As a full stack engineer at Hotplate, you'll build end to end features that will directly impact how thousands of chefs and bakers run their businesses. You'll get to stretch across a range of work like building scalable systems & infrastructure to handle Ticketmaster style food drops, chef facing features that will provide powerful ways to manage and grow their business, and consumer facing storefront and buying experiences that delight.
This role is best suited for someone who likes to participate in the full process of building features, from supporting on ideation and design to executing features independently.
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
Extremely comfortable working full stack
A high bar for delivering clean, intuitive, UX experiences
A love for designing products and features from scratch
Have worked in early to mid stage startups before, with experience taking projects from 0 to 1 independently
Comfortable with our stack: React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node, Express, PostgreSQL, AWS
You use AI coding tools in your current development workflow (Claude Code, Codex etc), and you're always exploring new ones, testing what's worth bringing into how Hotplate builds
3+ years of product focused, full stack engineering
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.
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 want the problem scoped and prioritized for you. Here you'll often be the one figuring out which problem matters most to solve next, then scoping it yourself by talking to chefs and digging into the data.
You'd rather stay in your lane. Every engineer pushes code to every layer of the app, and a feature isn't done until it works for the chef and their customers.
You need regular check ins to stay on track. Nobody is managing your task list. You set your own priorities and tell us when something is off.
You wait for permission to color outside the lines. If you see something broken, or a better way to build it, we want you to say so and fix it.
You're looking for close, day to day mentorship. You'll have a supportive team, but this role works best for someone with a few years of shipping product who can ramp up on their own.
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.