The objective of this research is to design all-optically tunable plasmonic metasurface platforms for both understanding and demonstrating tailored transient optical properties driven by ultrafast hot-carrier excitation and relaxation processes. Contrary to the impressions of hot-carrier dynamics being a material response, although limited, the transient process can be controlled to take action in a desired manner. Furthermore, the modulation depth and temporal characteristics of the resultant optical transient induced by hot-carrier dynamics is determined via the mutual interplay between the characteristics of the optical resonance modes and carrier dynamics. Thus, a fundamental understanding of the elementary features of hot-carrier-driven active metasurfaces is of great importance. In this work, the acquired fundamental knowledge was simultaneously leveraged for enhancing the performance measures of the active device and achieving novel optical features such as chiroptical response. The design principles provided in this research can be utilized to construct device components for system-level integration enabling novel functionalities.