---
title: 'Sr. Data Scientist at Aarden AI'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/sr-data-scientist-aarden-ai-seattle-bwp61a5sey8r'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-29'
---

# Sr. Data Scientist at Aarden AI

- **Company:** Aarden AI
- **Location:** Seattle, WA
- **Compensation:** $150k–$190k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-21
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-29
- **Apply:** https://jobs.gem.com/aarden-ai/am9icG9zdDrm5nrHrRF9CisVxSxZGtYH

## Job description

## About Us

Aarden is a land intelligence platform that helps landowners, investors, and developers figure out what a piece of land can actually be used for, and how to market it. We turn messy parcel, infrastructure, market, community, and ecological data into clear, bankable answers for land-dependent assets. Our goal is to become the default decision layer for land: helping physical projects start in places where they can be built and supported for decades.

## The Role

Aarden’s business is built around providing unique, highly trusted insights about land use, land value, and market dynamics to our customers. We are looking for a product-focused data scientist to help us maintain and develop several of the models and analytics that power those insights.

Today that work spans three primary areas. First, we score parcel-level suitability for specific development uses, so a given site gets assessed differently depending on whether someone is evaluating it for conservation, a data center, solar, wind, or residential development. Second, we run an automated valuation model and comparable transactions identification for bare land, where comps are often thin and estimating the value of land is contingent on how the land might be used. And third, we model current and historic community sentiment related to different development activities. You'd own meaningful pieces of these modeling efforts and help decide what analytical capabilities we build next.

## What You'll Do

- Build new models and analytics that surface insights from our ever-growing database of land and market attributes.
- Extend and refine existing models to improve performance and support new use cases.
- Source, evaluate, and curate datasets on land use, property characteristics, and market factors, both as model inputs and for validation.
- Work with design, product, and engineering to deliver your work to customers. If you're interested, you'll also have the chance to build user-facing features yourself.

## What We're Looking For

- Strong data science and ML fundamentals, plus hands-on experience with geospatial data and tooling (GDAL/OGR, Postgres/PostGIS, Sedona, or similar).
- Production-quality Python and fluent SQL, with willingness to pick up other languages as needed (e.g., TypeScript).
- A track record of designing evaluation frameworks for geospatial, environmental, or socioeconomic models, where ground truth may be scarce, imbalanced, or contested.
- Experience using LLMs as components in data pipelines or modeling.
- Proven discipline for building data curation and model development workflows that are documented, reproducible, and versioned.
- Good judgment about how your outputs impacts customers, including the ability to explain them to non-experts.

Additional Nice to Haves

- Experience in one or more of the domains we model: renewable energy, land conservation, forestry, data center development, residential real estate, or commercial real estate.
- Deep expertise in a technique or data type outside our current areas of focus (e.g., imagery, lidar, forecasting, simulation) paired with a view on how it could help our product strategy.
- Comfort and an interest in supporting customer-facing demos, presentations, and discussions.

Working at Aarden Aarden is a high-trust, high-output team. We’re striving to be intentional about our team growth. This allows us to test the outer boundaries of our individual capabilities, while also going deeper on developer tooling and support. You’ll work hard here, and we’ve got your back.

Practically, this means you’ll be asked to take on large projects, have a high bar of expectations to meet, and have a strong support system to help you meet that high bar. That support system includes:

- At least 2 in-person days per week | We’ve found that while heads-down time at home is fantastic for task-related productivity, in-person time is magic for longer-form productivity and relationship building. You’ll be expected to work at least 2 in-person days at either our headquarters in Seattle or our regional hub in Boulder, CO. In the latter case, you’ll also be expected to travel to Seattle on a periodic basis to meet with our full team. Our in-person days are used to plan, troubleshoot, and check-in with each other on progress and questions. Expect team lunches and whiteboarding.
- Focused ownership in your role | The rest of the team is here to help you and cares deeply about the long-term functionality of our applications. With that said, we’ll be looking to you to own your lane, go deep, and develop a strong stance on what it takes to make our applications best-in-class.
- Dedicated monthly AI tooling budget | We’re in a golden era of AI-powered developer tooling. We strongly encourage augmenting your output with AI tools, and have a dedicated & flexible budget for every team member to support that setup. We care about what you ship, not how.

## About Aarden AI

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Aarden provides AI-powered data and transaction infrastructure to modernize land investment, underwriting, and stewardship for institutional landowners, investors, and developers.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Seed stage)
- **Headquarters**: Seattle, Washington, United States
- **Founded**: Year not publicly specified; emerged from stealth in 2025
- **Founders**: Danan Margason (CEO), Ben Hudson (Technical Co-Founder & Head of Applied Science)

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Data Infrastructure & Analytics, Real Estate / Land Investment Technology (PropTech)
- Target customers: Institutional landowners, capital allocators (e.g., pension funds, endowments), renewable energy developers (solar, wind), data center developers, conservation groups, and project developers.
- Mission or purpose statement: To reimagine land stewardship for a new era, unlocking both economic and environmental value by bringing modern intelligence to land decisions.

## Products & Services
- **Aarden Platform (Decisioning Layer for Land Investment)**: An AI-driven SaaS platform that synthesizes parcel data, ownership records, land characteristics, conservation overlays, comparable sales, and operational metrics into a single, queryable model. It provides dynamic valuation analysis, scenario modeling, and investment guidance, compressing due diligence from weeks to hours.
- **Underwriting & Workflow Tools**: AI and agent-driven valuation and scenario analysis tools that help users assess risk, track portfolio trends, and identify hidden value across thousands of variables.
- **Execution Rails**: Standardized diligence packages and closing workflows designed to connect buyers, sellers, and service providers, bringing liquidity and transparency to the land asset class.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not disclosed.
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of **$4 million** (Seed round, announced November 2025).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Led by **Planeteer Capital**, with participation from Founders Co-op, KDX, Superorganism, Stepchange, and Len Jordan (Madrona).
- **Growth Signals**: Strong early traction with a team of **7 employees** as of late 2025, representing **+700% YoY headcount growth**. The company is actively hiring across commercial, engineering, and research roles. The land asset class is experiencing explosive growth due to demand from solar, data centers, carbon credits, and conservation.

## Competitive Advantages
- **First-Mover in AI-Native Land Intelligence**: Aarden is building a new category by applying advanced AI (satellite imagery, policy data, market signals) to a traditionally offline and fragmented multi-trillion-dollar asset class.
- **Data Synthesis & Alignment**: The platform bridges the information gap between sophisticated developers and institutional landowners, creating transparency and alignment that speeds up transactions and unlocks fairer valuations.
- **Founding Team Expertise**: The team brings deep domain experience from companies like Zillow, Amazon, Carbon Direct, and Climate Neutral, combining strengths in geospatial data, marketplace design, climate, and AI.

## Strategic Focus
- **Data Expansion & Automation**: The company plans to use its $4M funding to expand data coverage across the US and deepen underwriting automation with AI.
- **Platform Growth**: Focused on bringing the platform to more capital allocators and project developers.
- **Category Creation**: Aiming to become the standard decisioning layer for land investment, moving the entire industry from fragmented, offline processes to a modern, transparent, and liquid market.

## Why Work Here
- **High Impact & Ownership**: As a small, fast-moving startup (7 people), every hire has outsized impact. Employees are directly involved in shaping a new category and defining how the world manages land.
- **Mission-Driven**: The company is committed to enabling positive environmental outcomes alongside economic returns, solving real problems in climate resilience, energy independence, and housing.
- **Culture & Perks**: Offers a culture of growth in a fast-paced, innovative environment. Benefits include competitive compensation, meaningful equity, health/dental/vision insurance, flexible PTO, hybrid work options, parental leave, and a commitment to investing in AI tools and employee growth.
- **Hybrid Work**: Open roles in Seattle are listed as either "In-person" or "Hybrid," indicating flexibility while valuing in-office collaboration.
- **Talent Pool**: The company is attracting talent from notable climate and tech firms like Carbon Direct, Root Geospatial, and Omnidian.

## Sources
1. [aarden.ai](https://www.aarden.ai/)
2. [aarden.ai/careers](https://www.aarden.ai/careers)
3. [aarden.ai/about-us](https://www.aarden.ai/about-us)
4. [aarden.ai (Funding Announcement)](https://www.aarden.ai/aarden-announcement)
5. [LinkedIn](https://linkedin.com/company/aarden-ai)

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