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About This Role
Overview
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Regional Vice Presidents are responsible for ensuring their region maximizes revenue and cash flow growth through effective management and development of associates and managers. For Waterparks and Family Entertainment Centers (FECs), this includes maintaining a strong focus on operational excellence, safety, and exceptional guest experiences in high-traffic, dynamic environments. The Regional Vice President provides strategic direction and acts as the primary support for the team of District and Area Managers in his/her designated region. The Regional Vice President must provide leadership and vision to his/her region(s) management team in support of Lucky Strike Entertainment’s mission and values, tailored to the unique demands of water-based attractions and indoor/outdoor amusement operations.
ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES: Primary duties and responsibilities include, but are not limited to the following:
- Recruit, hire, develop, and retain District and Area Managers who are passionate about delivering an exceptional guest experience at Waterparks and FECs, while achieving financial goals across various entertainment, food & beverage, and attraction offerings.
- Identify and act on the unique training and development needs of District and Area Managers. Use the Talent Management Process tools for their development and succession planning. Collaborate with HR and Training departments to build an appropriate talent bench, with a focus on guest safety, attraction operations, and crowd management.
- Communicate, monitor, and deliver on Key Performance Indicators (KPI) with District and Area Managers. Conduct annual performance reviews and competency assessments tailored to FEC and Waterpark metrics such as throughput, guest satisfaction, revenue per capita, and safety compliance.
- Ensure a world-class guest experience by ensuring that Lucky Strike Entertainment’s Operating and Service Standards are executed consistently across water-based rides, arcade zones, food courts, party/event spaces, and other family entertainment offerings.
- Ensure the District and Area Managers are conducting regular inspections using Lucky Strike Entertainment’s visit checklists and tools, customized to include FEC safety standards, water ride operational audits, and family experience evaluations.
- Manage the execution of seasonal price changes, weekly specials, and various promotions, often aligned with school holidays, weather patterns, and regional family travel trends.
- Develop annual business plans and ensure that District and Area Managers are given specific goals to achieve. Collaborate with the District and Area Managers to develop the Annual Operating Plan (budget) for the region. Ensure accountability to this AOP. Review and analyze daily and weekly financial reports and monthly P&L performance.
- Evaluate financial performance and ensure District and Area Managers are involved in establishing and implementing effective action plans. Plan revenue growth and closely monitor expense control with a particular emphasis on strategic labor management, especially during peak seasons and high-traffic weekends.
- Develop a sales culture amongst District and Area Managers where being proactive and entrepreneurial is the expectation, including revenue streams like group sales, birthday parties, season passes, food and beverage, and retail.
- Ensure adherence to Operating Standards for water safety, lifeguard certification, food safety, sanitation, ride maintenance, alcohol service, and all local/state/federal safety regulations relevant to Waterparks and FECs.
- Ability to work varying shifts, weekends, holidays, and extended workdays to support seasonal fluctuations and business needs.
SUPERVISORY RESPONSIBILITIES: District Manager(s), Area Manager(s), Regional Event Manager(s), Area Facility Manager(s), Area Chef(s), and other operational leaders within Waterpark and FEC venues.
QUALIFICATIONS: The Regional Vice President is a proven leader and operator familiar with high-growth, guest-centric environments such as Waterparks and FECs. Skilled at managing a P&L, teaching financial discipline, and driving results through team development. This leader is adept at hiring and mentoring talent, enforcing safety standards, and delivering high-quality guest experiences across a variety of attractions and services. Strong interpersonal and communication skills, high integrity, and analytical thinking are essential. Must be comfortable building relationships with vendors, corporate departments, and frontline teams in fast-paced environments. A sales-minded approach and the ability to lead seasonal and year-round business strategies are critical.
EDUCATION AND/OR EXPERIENCE: Bachelor’s degree preferred. Minimum five years of multi-unit management experience in a high-volume entertainment, hospitality, Waterpark, or FEC setting required. Proven success supervising diverse teams (100+ employees), managing attractions, food & beverage, and events with a strong operational and financial track record.
WORK ENVIRONMENT / PHYSICAL DEMANDS: Typical of waterparks and family entertainment venues, including both indoor and outdoor environments, variable weather conditions, and high-activity spaces. Includes corporate administrative work and frequent site visits.
Who We Are
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Lucky Strike Entertainment, formerly Bowlero Corp, is one of the world’s premier location-based entertainment platforms. With over 360 locations across North America, Lucky Strike Entertainment provides experiential offerings in bowling, amusements, water parks, and family entertainment centers. The company also owns the Professional Bowlers Association, the major league of bowling and a growing media property that boasts millions of fans around the globe. For more information on Lucky Strike Entertainment, please visit ir.luckystrikeent.com.
The pay range for this position is $200,000.00 to $225,000 yearly plus bonus.
Lucky Strike Entertainment offers performance-based incentives and a competitive total rewards package which includes healthcare coverage and a broad range of other benefits. Incentives and/or benefit packages may vary depending on the position. More details regarding benefits are available here: www.bowlerocorp.com/careers/benefits
Salary Context
This $200K-$225K range is above the median for AI/ML Engineer roles in our dataset (median: $170K across 217 roles with salary data).
View full AI/ML Engineer salary data →Role Details
About This Role
AI/ML Engineers build and deploy machine learning models in production. They work across the full ML lifecycle: data pipelines, model training, evaluation, and serving infrastructure. The role has evolved significantly over the past two years. Where ML Engineers once spent most of their time on model architecture, the job now tilts heavily toward inference optimization, cost management, and integrating LLM capabilities into existing systems. Companies want engineers who can ship production systems, and the experimenter-only role is fading fast.
Day-to-day, you're writing training pipelines, debugging data quality issues, setting up evaluation frameworks, and figuring out why your model performs differently in staging than it did on your dev set. The best ML engineers are obsessive about reproducibility and measurement. They instrument everything. They know that a model is only as good as the data feeding it and the infrastructure serving it.
Across the 37,339 AI roles we're tracking, AI/ML Engineer positions make up 91% of the market. At Lucky Strike Entertainment, this role fits into their broader AI and engineering organization.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
What the Work Looks Like
A typical week might include: debugging a data pipeline that's silently dropping 3% of training examples, running A/B tests on a new model version, writing documentation for a feature flag system that lets you roll back model deployments, and reviewing a junior engineer's PR for a new evaluation metric. Meetings tend to be cross-functional since ML touches product, engineering, and data teams.
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
Skills Required
Python and PyTorch dominate the requirements. Most roles expect experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and familiarity with ML frameworks like TensorFlow or JAX. RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) has become a top-3 skill requirement as companies integrate LLMs into their products. Docker and Kubernetes show up in about a third of postings, reflecting the production focus of the role.
Beyond the core stack, employers increasingly want experience with experiment tracking tools (MLflow, Weights & Biases), feature stores, and vector databases. Fine-tuning experience is valuable but less common than you'd think from reading Twitter. Most production LLM work is RAG and prompt engineering, not fine-tuning. If you have both, you're in a strong position.
Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
Compensation Benchmarks
AI/ML Engineer roles pay a median of $154,000 based on 8,743 positions with disclosed compensation. This role's midpoint ($212K) sits 38% above the category median. Disclosed range: $200K to $225K.
Across all AI roles, the market median is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. For comparison, the highest-paying categories include AI Engineering Manager ($293,500) and AI Safety ($274,200). By seniority level: Entry: $85,000; Mid: $147,000; Senior: $225,000; Director: $230,600; VP: $248,357.
Lucky Strike Entertainment AI Hiring
Lucky Strike Entertainment has 2 open AI roles right now. They're hiring across AI/ML Engineer. Positions span US, Los Angeles, CA, US. Compensation range: $225K - $225K.
Location Context
AI roles in Los Angeles pay a median of $179,440 across 1,356 tracked positions. That's 6% below the national median.
Career Path
Common paths into AI/ML Engineer roles include Data Scientist, Software Engineer, Research Engineer.
From here, career progression typically leads toward ML Architect, AI Engineering Manager, Principal ML Engineer.
The fastest path into ML engineering is through software engineering with a self-directed ML education. A CS degree helps, but production engineering skills matter more than academic credentials. Build something that works, deploy it, and measure it. That portfolio project is worth more than a Coursera certificate. For career growth, the fork comes around the senior level: go deep on technical complexity (staff/principal track) or move into managing ML teams.
What to Expect in Interviews
Expect system design questions around ML pipelines: how you'd build a training pipeline for a specific use case, handle data drift, or design A/B testing infrastructure for model deployments. Coding rounds typically involve Python, with emphasis on data manipulation (pandas, numpy) and algorithm implementation. Take-home assignments often ask you to build an end-to-end ML pipeline from raw data to deployed model.
When evaluating opportunities: Companies that are serious about AI/ML hiring tend to post specific infrastructure details in the job description: the frameworks they use, their model serving stack, their data pipeline tools. Vague postings that just say 'ML experience required' without specifics are often companies that haven't figured out what they need yet.
AI Hiring Overview
The AI job market has 37,339 open positions tracked in our dataset. By seniority: 3,672 entry-level, 23,272 mid-level, 7,048 senior, and 3,347 leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level). Remote roles make up 7% of the market (2,732 positions). The remaining 34,484 roles require on-site or hybrid attendance.
The market median for AI roles is $190,000. Top-quartile compensation starts at $244,000. The 90th percentile reaches $300,688. Highest-paying categories: AI Engineering Manager ($293,500 median, 21 roles); AI Safety ($274,200 median, 24 roles); Research Engineer ($260,000 median, 264 roles).
Demand for AI/ML Engineers has been strong and consistent. Unlike some AI roles that spike with hype cycles, ML engineering is a foundational need. Every company deploying AI models needs people who can keep them running, and the gap between research prototypes and production systems keeps growing.
The AI Job Market Today
The AI job market spans 37,339 open positions across 15 role categories. The largest categories by volume: AI/ML Engineer (33,926), AI Software Engineer (823), AI Product Manager (805). These three account for the majority of open positions, though smaller categories often have higher per-role compensation because of specialized skill requirements.
The seniority mix tells a story about where AI teams are in their maturity. Entry-level roles (3,672) are outnumbered by mid-level (23,272) and senior (7,048) positions, reflecting that most companies are past the 'build a team from scratch' phase and need experienced engineers who can ship production systems. Leadership roles (Director, VP, C-Level) total 3,347 positions, representing the bottleneck between technical execution and organizational strategy.
Remote work availability sits at 7% of all AI roles (2,732 positions), with 34,484 requiring on-site or hybrid attendance. The remote share has stabilized after the post-pandemic correction. Senior and specialized roles (Research Scientist, ML Architect) are more likely to be remote-eligible than entry-level positions, partly because experienced hires have more negotiating power and partly because these roles require less hands-on mentorship.
AI compensation is structured in clear tiers. The market median sits at $190,000. Top-quartile roles start at $244,000, and the 90th percentile reaches $300,688. These figures include base salary with disclosed compensation. Total compensation (including equity, bonuses, and sign-on) runs 20-40% higher at companies that offer those components.
Category matters for compensation. AI Engineering Manager roles lead at $293,500 median, while Prompt Engineer roles sit at $145,600. The spread between highest and lowest-paying categories reflects the premium on specialized technical skills versus broader analytical roles.
The most in-demand skills across all AI postings: Rag (23,721 postings), Aws (12,486 postings), Rust (10,785 postings), Python (5,564 postings), Azure (3,616 postings), Gcp (3,032 postings), Prompt Engineering (2,112 postings), Kubernetes (1,713 postings). Python dominates, appearing in the vast majority of role descriptions regardless of category. Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) is the second most common requirement. The newer entrants to the top skills list (RAG, vector databases, LLM APIs) reflect the shift from traditional ML toward generative AI applications.
Frequently Asked Questions
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