Keen eye for design details with a focus on quality
Experience in bringing polished products to completion
Ability to quickly prototype ideas in hours
Skilled in creating reusable and maintainable UI components
Interest in AI and defining new user interaction methods
Responsibilities
Own the overall product design and user experience
Upgrade existing designs and ensure consistency across products
Design UI for new features and components as they are developed
Collaborate as a thought partner with engineers on UI aesthetics
Co-develop visual elements alongside the CEO
Integrate design patterns into AI tools for scalable solutions
Benefits
Opportunity to shape product design from the ground up
Work directly with the CEO and be part of strategic design discussions
High level of creative freedom and responsibility in design
Aesthetic focus in a team valuing detail and craft
Conditions that foster a fast-paced, innovative environment
Full Job Description
The Opportunity
As Hotplate's first design engineer, you'll own how the product looks and feels for thousands of chefs and millions of customers. We have a design system and reusable components, but developing a clean UI for most projects - and spending the time to think it through - is still one of the biggest slowdowns in feature development. 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, and be a thought partner for most of the engineers on what the UI for their features should look like. In some areas you'll co-develop visual rewrites with me (Ben, CEO). You'll also encode our patterns into AI tooling so the design system scales to every project automatically.
This is a great job for someone obsessive about UX and UI. I'm personally kept up at night by small interactions I don't have the time to act on - if you're obsessive in the same way and have a drive to constantly think about and improve them, you'll be very happy here.
What you will need to be successful
You're equally comfortable in Figma and your code editor
You have strong front-end engineering skills (TypeScript, React, SolidJS, CSS, animations)
You have an eye for design details and care deeply about craft
You've shipped polished products and know what it takes to get from 90% to 100%
You can move fast - prototyping ideas in hours, not days
You think in systems and can build reusable, maintainable UI components
You're excited about AI and want to help define new interaction paradigms
