Hotplate

About the Company

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.

Listed Jobs

Company Name

Hotplate

Job Title

Full Stack Engineer

Job Description

**Job Title** Full Stack Engineer **Role Summary** Design, develop, and maintain end‑to‑end features for a food‑service platform. Own the full lifecycle from ideation and design through independent implementation across front‑end, back‑end, and infrastructure layers. Deliver scalable, clean, user‑centric solutions that power chef‑ and baker‑focused services and consumer storefronts. **Expectations** - 3+ years of product‑focused, full‑stack engineering experience. - Proven ability to take projects from concept to launch in early‑ to mid‑stage startup environments. - Comfort with building scalable systems and high‑traffic infrastructure. - Strong UX sense and commitment to clean, intuitive interfaces. - Full ownership of end‑to‑end feature delivery from ideation to production. **Key Responsibilities** - Collaborate with product and design teams to translate requirements into technical solutions. - Architect and implement scalable server‑side services using Node/Express and AWS. - Build responsive, high‑performance user interfaces with React, Next.js, and TypeScript. - Design and manage PostgreSQL data models and queries for transactional correctness and performance. - Write automated tests (unit, integration, end‑to‑end) and maintain high test coverage. - Ensure secure, robust, and maintainable codebases; conduct code reviews and enforce best practices. - Deploy code to production environments, monitor performance, and troubleshoot incidents. - Continuously refactor and optimize code for readability, maintainability, and scalability. **Required Skills** - Proficiency in React, Next.js, TypeScript for front‑end development. - Deep experience with Node.js, Express for back‑end services. - Strong SQL skills; PostgreSQL database design and tuning. - Hands‑on experience with AWS services (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc.). - Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and cloud deployment. - Clean‑code mindset with emphasis on readability, testability, and documentation. - Excellent communication and collaborative problem‑solving skills. **Required Education & Certifications** - Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent hands‑on experience). - No mandatory certifications; relevant tech certifications (e.g., AWS Certified Developer) are a plus.

San francisco, United states

On site

23-01-2026