Director of Programs

Follow us@ngobox

About the Organization

Fish Welfare Initiative is an animal welfare organization that focuses on one of the most numerous and neglected groups of farmed animals: fishes.

We work to improve fish welfare by developing and implementing scalable, cost-effective, and evidence-based interventions. Our main program, the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), collaborates with fish farmers in Andhra Pradesh to improve water quality and reduce stocking densities. Alongside this, our Research & Development (R&D) department explores new interventions to identify the most effective ways to help fishes.

Right now, we are in an intervention-development phase—running one core program while conducting research to determine the best strategies for large-scale impact. We aim to transition to a program scaling stage by late 2026.

Job Description

Fish Welfare Initiative is hiring a Director of Programs to oversee our growing Programs Department and execute scalable, cost-effective, and evidence-based programs to improve animal welfare in aquaculture. If you are experienced at running agricultural programs, skilled at scaling, and passionate about animal welfare, this could be the right role for you.

Job Responsibilities

Oversight for effectively implementing our programs in India

• Selection of programs: Based on findings from FWI’s R&D department, lead the selection of promising interventions to take forward as new programs. Recommend the termination or transitioning of existing programs as needed.
• Development, implementation, and scaling of programs: Lead the design of new programs and redesign existing ones. Implement and scale programs with the goal of improving the welfare of thousands of farmed fishes in a cost-effective way.
• Monitoring and evaluation (M&E): Oversee the M&E of all programs, ensuring effective M&E strategies and systems are in place to assess program outputs, outcomes, and impacts.
• Impact assessments: Oversee and appropriately report impact estimates resulting from FWI’s programs. Commission or run relevant studies as needed.

Lead the Programs Department

• Staff management: Oversee the effective management of all staff in the Programs Department. Long-term you may be responsible for managing a team of Program Leads who are executing various large-scale programs in India.
• Goal setting: Oversee the setting of the Programs Department's annual objectives and key results (OKRs), and associated quarterly key results (QKRs) to show progress towards OKRs.
• Budgeting and finances: Oversee annual or longer budgeting for the Programs Department. Ensure the budget is spent effectively.
• Departmental representation: Represent the Programs Department within and beyond the organization. This includes providing updates to the entire team about the department’s work, occasional public talks and blogs, and participating in fundraising and other stakeholder calls as directed by the Executive Director.

Organization-level leadership

• Upholding FWI’s cultural values: Live out FWI’s cultural values in your daily work, and support an organization-wide environment where these values are upheld.
• Leadership meetings and decisions: Participate in leadership meetings and decisions as requested by the Executive Director.

Education Qualification/Required Skills & Experience

• Nationality: You are an Indian national OR long-term resident.
• Experience: You have 3 years or more of leadership experience running a program or organization, managing a team, and developing strategies.
• Specifically, we are looking for someone with experience in running cost-effective programs like the ones GiveWell might recommend, or the equivalent for animal welfare programs.
• Language: You are fluent in written and oral English.
• Location: On average, you will spend 1-4 weeks per quarter in Eluru, Andhra Pradesh.
• This in-person requirement may reduce with time (e.g., when we have independently working Program Leads for all programs at the time).​

Desired Skills and Experience

The following attributes give you a sense of what the ideal candidate looks like.

• Ownership and Leadership: You take ownership over the Programs Department, contributing to its success and growth in alignment with FWI’s vision and mission. You inspire program teams to execute at the highest level.
• Strategy: You make effective strategic decisions.
• Openness to change: Taking the lean start-up approach, you test ideas quickly and adapt based on what we learn. You move fast, reassess often, and are willing to drop ideas that don’t work.
• Local knowledge: You are familiar with opportunities and challenges of nonprofit work in the Indian context and have the relevant local network.
• Extremely organized: You manage a variety of different tasks effectively.
• Good resource management: You allocate resources to the relevant people and programs in a cost-effective way.
• Relationship building: You build and maintain key relationships to drive forward the department’s work.
• Telugu: While not strictly required, as most of our team is Telugu we prefer candidates with Telugu language ability.

Please fill out this form. We will review all applications latest by April 30 and inform you shortly after.

For more information please check the Link

Tags Jobs in Andhra Pradesh Jobs in Agriculture Jobs in Monitoring