The OpportunityAs 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
