We're Hiring: Aquaculture Manager
Location: United Arab Emirates (Remote)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Experience Level: Mid-Level to Senior
Work Arrangement: Fully Remote
About Us
We are a globally focused aquaculture organization committed to sustainable, efficient, and responsible aquatic food production. Our operations emphasize animal health, water quality, biosecurity, feed efficiency, production performance, environmental stewardship, food safety, and continuous improvement.
The Role
We are seeking an experienced Aquaculture Manager to oversee aquaculture production, stock health, water quality, feeding programs, hatchery or grow-out operations, biosecurity, facilities, workforce, budgets, regulatory compliance, and production performance.
The successful candidate will combine practical aquaculture expertise with strong operational leadership, data analysis, financial management, and a commitment to animal welfare and environmental sustainability.
Key Responsibilities
- Develop and implement aquaculture production strategies aligned with business and sustainability objectives.
- Manage daily hatchery, nursery, grow-out, pond, tank, cage, or recirculating aquaculture operations as applicable.
- Establish production plans covering stocking, feeding, growth, health, harvesting, and biomass targets.
- Monitor stocking densities, biomass, growth rates, survival, feed intake, and production performance.
- Develop and manage feeding programs appropriate to species, life stage, water conditions, and production objectives.
- Monitor feed quality, feed conversion ratio, feeding efficiency, and feed-related costs.
- Establish water-quality monitoring programs covering temperature, dissolved oxygen, pH, salinity, ammonia, nitrite, alkalinity, turbidity, and other relevant parameters.
- Investigate water-quality deviations and implement corrective actions.
- Maintain reliable water intake, filtration, aeration, circulation, pumping, oxygenation, and treatment systems.
- Implement effective aquatic-animal health and disease-prevention programs.
- Coordinate with aquatic veterinarians, fish-health specialists, laboratories, and technical consultants.
- Monitor disease symptoms, mortality, abnormal behavior, growth problems, and other health indicators.
- Develop and maintain biosecurity protocols for stock movement, equipment, personnel, water, feed, and visitors.
- Oversee quarantine, acclimation, stocking, grading, handling, and transfer procedures.
- Manage hatchery activities including broodstock management, spawning, egg handling, larval production, nursery operations, and juvenile quality where applicable.
- Manage broodstock selection, breeding programs, genetic performance, and stock replacement where applicable.
- Maintain appropriate stocking densities and optimize production conditions throughout the culture cycle.
- Coordinate grading, sampling, biomass estimation, harvesting, and post-harvest handling.
- Ensure harvested products meet customer, processor, food-safety, and market specifications.
- Manage cold-chain procedures and product traceability where applicable.
- Monitor animal welfare and ensure responsible handling practices throughout production.
- Manage production facilities, tanks, ponds, cages, raceways, pumps, aeration systems, filtration systems, generators, and monitoring equipment.
- Establish preventive-maintenance programs to minimize equipment failures and production interruptions.
- Manage farm employees, technicians, hatchery staff, feeders, contractors, and seasonal workers.
- Develop workforce schedules, responsibilities, training plans, and performance expectations.
- Train employees in animal handling, feeding, water-quality monitoring, biosecurity, safety, and emergency procedures.
- Prepare and manage operating budgets, production costs, labor costs, feed expenses, health costs, and capital requirements.
- Forecast requirements for feed, equipment, chemicals, health products, spare parts, and other production inputs.
- Manage procurement and evaluate supplier quality, availability, pricing, and service performance.
- Maintain accurate stock inventories, production records, health records, feed records, water-quality data, and harvest documentation.
- Use production-management systems and analytical tools to identify trends, risks, inefficiencies, and improvement opportunities.
- Prepare regular reports covering biomass, survival, growth, feed performance, water quality, health, costs, and production output.
- Investigate mortality events, disease outbreaks, water-quality failures, equipment breakdowns, and production losses.
- Establish emergency-response procedures for oxygen depletion, power failure, extreme weather, disease outbreaks, water contamination, and other operational risks.
- Ensure compliance with applicable aquaculture, animal-health, environmental, food-safety, occupational-safety, and fisheries requirements.
- Monitor environmental impacts including effluent quality, nutrient discharge, waste generation, water consumption, and energy use.
- Implement resource-efficiency and sustainability initiatives across aquaculture operations.
- Maintain strong relationships with regulators, laboratories, veterinarians, suppliers, processors, customers, researchers, and industry partners.
- Evaluate new technologies, automation, sensors, remote monitoring, artificial intelligence, and precision-aquaculture solutions.
- Lead continuous-improvement programs to increase survival, growth, feed efficiency, product quality, sustainability, and profitability.
Key Performance Indicators
- Total production volume.
- Survival rate.
- Growth rate and average daily growth.
- Biomass productivity.
- Feed conversion ratio.
- Feed cost per unit of production.
- Stocking-density performance.
- Mortality rate and disease incidence.
- Water-quality compliance.
- Dissolved oxygen and other critical parameter stability.
- Biosecurity compliance.
- Health-treatment effectiveness.
- Hatchery survival and juvenile quality where applicable.
- Harvest yield and product quality.
- Product rejection or downgrade rate.
- Production cost per unit.
- Labor productivity.
- Equipment uptime and maintenance performance.
- Energy and water-use efficiency.
- Effluent and waste-management compliance.
- Inventory accuracy.
- Regulatory compliance.
- Food-safety performance.
- Employee safety performance.
- Budget adherence.
- Supplier performance.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Continuous-improvement savings and productivity gains.
Ideal Candidate
The successful candidate should have substantial experience in aquaculture production, fish or shellfish farming, hatchery management, aquatic animal health, fisheries operations, or a related field, preferably within a commercial aquaculture environment.
The candidate should demonstrate:
- Strong practical knowledge of aquaculture production systems and aquatic animal husbandry.
- Experience with fish, shrimp, shellfish, or other commercially farmed aquatic species.
- Strong understanding of water-quality management and aquatic production environments.
- Knowledge of aquatic nutrition, feeding strategies, biomass management, and feed efficiency.
- Experience with aquatic animal health, disease prevention, biosecurity, and treatment programs.
- Understanding of hatchery, nursery, broodstock, or grow-out operations.
- Strong workforce leadership and farm-management capabilities.
- Experience managing budgets, procurement, suppliers, and production resources.
- Ability to analyze production, health, water-quality, and financial data.
- Familiarity with aquaculture monitoring systems, sensors, automation, recirculating systems, or precision-aquaculture technologies.
- Strong understanding of environmental, food-safety, animal-health, and regulatory requirements.
- Excellent communication and reporting skills in English.
- Strong organizational, analytical, and problem-solving abilities.
- Ability to respond effectively to production emergencies and rapidly changing conditions.
- A practical, data-driven, sustainability-focused, and continuous-improvement mindset.