Customer Support

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.

About the role

As the second member of Hotplate's support team, you will be charged with tackling tickets and helping to build out our support systems as we grow from 5,000 to 50,000 chefs. You are the person that chefs will talk to when it matters most, and you both enjoy and are energized by turning around a chef's experience when something goes wrong. You'll proactively tackle tickets over phone, SMS, and email, while still thinking about how you scale yourself and Hotplate's support functions. That could look like building out macros and documentation, leveraging AI tools to help you move faster, or even thinking about how the product can be improved to better support our chefs.

Responsibilities

• Proactively tackle support tickets via phone, SMS, and email
• Build out macros, documentation, and support systems to scale Hotplate’s support functions
• Leverage AI tools to improve efficiency in drafting, summarizing, researching, and workflows
• Provide clear technical troubleshooting and explain product behavior to customers and internal teams
• Improve the product based on feedback to better support chefs

Requirements

• 6 months of customer support experience in tech, ideally at an early to mid-stage startup
• Strong customer obsession and excitement to help small business owners succeed
• Comfort with technical troubleshooting and clear communication
• Excellent written and verbal communication across email, SMS, and phone
• Experience with support tools like Intercom, Zendesk, Front, or similar
• Experience using AI tools in your work
• Strong judgment, ownership, and follow-through; ability to prioritize well and stay calm under pressure

Schedule

Sunday - Thursday, handling approximately 500 tickets per week.

Pay

Compensation range: $100K - $120K