StrongMind, a provider of digital curriculum, learning technology, and homeschool programs for K–12 students, announced the appointment of Rui Costa as Chief Technology Officer. Costa, who brings more than a decade of experience shipping AI and machine learning systems at Google, Amazon Web Services, and Epic Games, will lead StrongMind’s engineering organization. His mandate is to complete a unified platform on which every StrongMind product is built, deployed, and secured the same way, and to make the company “AI-native,” treating AI as the way software is built. Damian Creamer, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of StrongMind, said Costa has already stood up the foundation for the company's products. Before joining StrongMind, Costa held senior engineering roles, including as a Senior Software and Machine Learning Engineer at Google, where he built the Google Speech Analysis Framework and holds a patent for securely sharing pre-trained machine learning models. At Amazon Web Services, as a Principal Solutions Developer, he delivered the first public success story for generative AI in manufacturing with Volkswagen Production and Logistics and built an MLOps framework for regulated healthcare deployments. At Epic Games, as a Principal Software Development Engineer, he built platform and developer tooling for the Epic Games Store, including the Gifting Service and a cache-invalidation service, and rebuilt the Achievements system using agentic AI.