Forward Deployed Analyst

Aarden AI•Seattle, WA

4h•$95,000 - $150,000•Hybrid

About The Position

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. We're a team of eight, and until now our founders have run all commercial activity themselves. This is an opportunity to join our commercial team at the ground floor. You'll be Aarden's person on the ground with clients: embedded in their world, learning how they think about land, and making our platform work for the problems they actually have. Our clients span very different industries — timberland investors, agriculture funds, solar and data center developers, industrial land buyers. Each one uses land intelligence differently. Your job is to figure out what each client needs, then deliver it. That means two things in practice. First, you'll run new product implementations: onboarding clients, training their teams, configuring the platform around their workflows, and making sure they get value fast. Second, you'll produce direct deliverables — reports, memos, and custom analyses — that meet needs the product doesn't yet cover out of the box. Along the way, you'll become our best source of client insight. You'll spot pain points, hear what clients wish existed, and translate that back to our product and applied science teams. What you learn in the field shapes what we build next. This role highly rewards curiosity. One week you might be deep in forestry economics; the next, light industrial site selection or interconnection queues. We also expect successful hires to have a very high quality bar. The work you produce is our customers' experience of Aarden. Our team works very hard to build models and tools — you bring it the last mile to the customer — and presentation matters quite a lot. Trajectory This is a generalist role that touches client services, customer success, product, and research. We also have ambitions to develop a team of forward deployed analysts — you'd be our first, defining what success means and directly influencing our customer engagement and product strategies.

Requirements

Experience in management consulting or an equally rigorous analytical environment where you produced client-facing work under time pressure.
Genuine curiosity and range. You're energized, not intimidated, by learning industries from forestry to light industrial from scratch
Strong client instincts: you can sit with a customer, understand what's actually bothering them, and turn that into action
Strong writing and deck-building. You can turn complex data into something a non-expert can act on
Comfort with ambiguity and unstructured problems. We have a clear output standard, but getting there takes judgment, not a checklist
You love finding the edges of what a complex tool can do. You're excited to become an Aarden super-user
High ownership instinct — you're the kind of person who finishes things

Nice To Haves

Exposure to technology, product management, real assets, energy infrastructure, private equity, or land and agriculture investment
Familiarity with geospatial data, GIS tools, or infrastructure siting analysis
Time at a startup or early-stage company where the playbook didn't exist yet

Responsibilities

Lead new client onboarding and implementation: run training sessions, manage timelines, and get clients to value quickly
Produce client deliverables using Aarden's platform — reports, memos, and analyses that institutional investors and developers use to make real capital decisions
Own the deliverable workflow end to end: scoping, drafting, QA, revision, delivery
Field inbound client questions and become a trusted point of contact
Sit close enough to clients to identify their pain points, workarounds, and unmet needs — including the ones they haven't articulated yet
Translate what you hear in the field into clear, prioritized feedback for our product team
Help decide what we build next based on real client friction
Pull infrastructure, regulatory, environmental, and market signals together into a coherent story about a site
Creatively assemble high-quality work products on tight timelines, even when the request doesn't fit an existing template
Build reusable templates and frameworks that let us scale delivery without letting quality slip
Prepare materials for account reviews, renewal conversations, and expansion scoping
Support pipeline development: target research, outreach, pitches, conferences and events