Senior Data Engineer — AI-Native Data Platform

Aarden is hiring a Senior Data Engineer to own and evolve its core datasets and the pipelines that keep them current. The role focuses on operating and improving the data platform, ensuring data quality, and partnering with product and analytics teams on datasets and intelligence products.

Responsibilities

• Own the day-to-day reliability and operation of our data infrastructure, including S3, Iceberg, Postgres, Lambda, PMTiles, and raster datasets
• Monitor, troubleshoot, and improve pipeline performance, observability, and data quality
• Extend existing pipelines to support new data sources and transformations
• Use automation and AI-assisted workflows where they make operations more reliable or efficient
• Work with product to build datasets that support new features
• Co-develop intelligence products with the analytics team
• Keep pipeline and dataset documentation useful and current
• Stay current on data and geospatial technologies relevant to our stack. Identify opportunities to improve it, run focused experiments, and recommend changes when the benefits justify the tradeoffs

Skills

• Owned the operation of one or more production data pipelines for a continuous period of at least 12 months
• Experience with relational databases and lakehouse architectures
• Strong Python skills
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Prefect, Airflow, Dagster, or similar)
• Curiosity and excitement about AI and the impact it can have on our ways of working as developers
• Comfort working in a git-based, CI-friendly workflow
• Minimum of 5 years of professional experience
• Experience with geospatial data and associated tooling (GDAL, GeoParquet, PostGIS, Apache Sedona, or similar)
• Experience working in full-stack environments, where your work can directly impact the application layer
• Comfortable with PySpark or similar distributed data processing
• Experience with Apache Sedona or other cloud spatial-compute platforms
• Experience building observability/logging layers for data pipelines (not just app services)
• Experience with socioeconomic, property, parcel, real estate, or land data
• Experience using AI agents to improve data architecture in a real production codebase
• Experience in real estate/land, energy, forestry, or agriculture tech
• Experience in data scraping; ideally via agents

Benefits

• Equity
• Bonus
• Relocation stipend available
• At least 2 in-person days per week at our office in Capitol Hill
• Team lunches
• Dedicated monthly AI tooling budget

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