About Me

I’m Vinicius Da Costa — a cybersecurity executive, GenAI engineer, and adjunct professor based in Charlotte, NC.

Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, I’ve spent 25+ years working in IT and security across financial services, retail, and consumer goods. I currently lead the Cybersecurity GenAI Engineering organization at Bank of America as SVP, and teach at the University of North Carolina Charlotte’s College of Computing and Informatics.

What I Write About

  • Cybersecurity — Zero Trust Architecture, enterprise security, the evolving threat landscape
  • GenAI — applying large language models to security engineering, AI-native tooling, building with Claude and LangChain

Publications & Patents

I co-authored a white paper for the Bank Policy Institute on Adaptive Trust: Zero Trust Architecture in a Financial Services Environment (2022), proposing a practical Zero Trust maturity framework for financial institutions.

I also hold a granted US patent (No. 20260044620) for a system that uses large language models to automatically correlate fragmented data across disparate enterprise systems — generating unified cross-channel identifiers and applying them as an active security control.

Background

I hold a Master of Information and Cybersecurity from UC Berkeley’s School of Information (MICS, 2022). Before Bank of America, I was Director of IT International & Allied Business at Lowe’s, and earlier served as CTO for Latin America across 21 countries at a Fortune 500 company.

I’m also involved with the UNC Charlotte Cybersecurity Clinic, a public-interest initiative that provides security services to resource-constrained organizations in the region.

Beyond the Screen

When I’m not in front of a keyboard I’m usually training for something. I’ve finished an IRONMAN triathlon (Florida, 2008), marathons in Chicago, Miami, and New York City, and climbed Mount Baker in Washington State with Alpine Ascents.

Contact