Catalin Caldararu

• Advised functional leaders on AI product strategy in an engagement focused on local AI.
• Originated, built, and shipped a private local AI system that powers data-driven acquisition decisions in a commercial niche, running at near-zero marginal cost per query. Combined semantic embeddings, sentiment analysis, and real market data to rank and notify users of acquisition candidates.

This work included research, product ownership, solution design, and delivery. I initiated and led a Product Innovation initiative, building a 35-invention Applied AI portfolio as a managed R&D product, owning its backlog, strategy, and Kanban-driven invention flow.

• As first-named inventor on 22 filed patent applications, initiated inventions spanning 8 domains: Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
• Became the top inventor at Dell's Romania site, conservatively ranking in the top 15% of the company's lifetime inventors (according to IDiyas).
• Produced a defensive IP portfolio protecting a Hybrid AI platform and its integrations across 4 commercial and 3 internal applications, with 4 more still ahead on the roadmap.
• Secured $1M in funding by pitching business cases for all 35 concepts to Software Engineering and Legal leadership.
• Defined the initial requirements, PRDs, and solution architectures for every invention (product concept).
• Drew in 10 co-inventors, a quarter of my former org, who decided to join and contribute to inventions across their domains without a formal mandate.
• Facilitated weekly refinement sessions with engineers, promoting Design Thinking and Structured Inventive Thinking (SIT).
• Drove the portfolio's development as a lead contributor, working with 4 attorneys to bring the filings through.

This work included research, back-end service design, development, testing, delivery, and monitoring. My early adoption of AI coding tools led to a horizontal move into a newly formed AI division in a different business unit. Worked across two 5-person Scrum teams on two AI initiatives, each with ~25 developers. First, a complete redesign of an existing Applied AI Desktop Application, then the greenfield Hybrid AI platform, where I joined the core inference team. Both products were featured at CES and Dell Technologies World and ship to all Dell AI PC customers.

• Sole developer for 6 OpenAI-compatible APIs and inference services spanning two silicon vendors, including the default conversational services (SLM and ASR), which were, at release, the most performant Dell services for these targets.
• Played a key role in enabling internal teams and customers to build Hybrid and Agentic Edge AI applications across heterogeneous AI PC fleets.
• Contributed to inference services across NPUs, GPUs, and CPUs, spanning all 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel).
• Built test suites measuring the accuracy, latency, and safety of candidate SLM and ASR models, determining which models shipped.
• Facilitated Daily Scrums for a 5-person AI inference team, assigning tasks and clearing blockers.
• Resolved defects and dependencies while coordinating directly with hardware vendors and three other Scrum teams (ML, DevOps, and a consumer).
• Monitored service quality across successive hardware, driver, and dependency versions, spotting degradation trends early and re-optimizing accordingly.
• Reported progress and impediments to internal and external leaders, including directors and Fellows.

Part of a 5-person Scrum team within a scaled modernization program of 20+ teams. This work included back-end service design, development, testing, delivery, and monitoring.

• Worked alongside two specialists (DBA and UX) and two rotating full-stack developers.
• Drove development with light oversight from the Engineering Manager and Program Architect.
• Built 3 full-stack modules comprising of 6 .NET APIs and 2 React front-ends.
• Consumed Web APIs from 5 Scrum teams and served APIs to 3 others.
• Facilitated Daily Scrums, cleared blockers, and acted as integration engineer for the team's releases, working with many stakeholders.
• Ensured deliverables met NFRs spanning automation, security, accessibility, observability, secret management, and performance.
• Onboarded 4 developers of varying experience levels, enabling the team to take on more work.
• Prevented technical debt through static code analysis, refactoring, code reviews, and pair programming.
• Collaborated directly with internal stakeholders and supported cross-team UAT/E2E defect triage.
• Monitored service quality and delivered targeted improvements.