Born in Karlsruhe, Simone von Rahden enjoys a varied career as a chamber musician, soloist, orchestral musician and teacher.

Her first engagements took her to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and the Lucerne Festival Orchestra while she was still a student; she has been a member of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe since 2009 and the Spira mirabilis project since 2007. She was also principal violist in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment from 2016–2021.

Simone von Rahden has performed as a soloist with the Philharmonie Baden-Baden, the English Haydn Orchestra, the Hamburg Camerata, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and the WDR Symphony Orchestra Cologne; as a chamber musician, she appears regularly throughout Europe, in recent years also increasingly with ensembles on historical instruments such as the Quartetto Bernardini and her string quintet Spunicunifait.

From 2014–2024, Simone von Rahden was a lecturer for viola at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin, where she worked closely with her former professor Tabea Zimmermann. She also taught viola, orchestral studies, literature studies and chamber music at the Rostock University of Music and Theatre from October 2020 until she took over the professorship for string chamber music at the same institute in October 2023.

She lives with her family in Sanitz near Rostock, where she runs a weekly singing group for children on a voluntary basis.