Catalin Caldararu

I'm no longer full-time at Dell, but I'm still driving my Applied AI patent portfolio to completion, until the remaining 13 applications are all filed.

Initiated and led a Product Innovation workstream that has resulted in a 35-item Applied AI patent application portfolio: 22 filed, 13 in development.

• Originated the portfolio as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications, working with 10 co-inventors and multiple attorneys to develop and protect ideas.
• Personally built core conversational capabilities (SLM and ASR) that power a Hybrid AI platform featured at CES, delivering them end-to-end on 2 of the 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel) and supporting the other 2.
• Incrementally secured $1M in Product R&D funding while serving as a core AI Software Developer on the platform, becoming an Innovation Lead.
• Authored PRDs for 35 differentiated AI product concepts spanning Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Digital Wellness, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
• Brainstormed new product ideas and applied systematic inventive thinking (SIT) to propose future states for 8 existing products.
• Prioritized, refined, and dropped ideas from the invention backlog based on the current value, unrealized value, time to market, and ability to innovate.
• Created, refined, and assigned user stories to the development team while contributing significantly to the implementation.
• Represented the development team in discussions with senior leaders and external partners, tracked the team's progress against goals, and proactively removed blockers.

• Built .NET microservices, React front-ends, and GitLab CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with 8 other teams.
• From my second year, I onboarded 7 developers, served as Scrum Master, and led cross-team UAT/E2E defect triage on rotation while expanding into AI.