• Applied AI
  • AI SDLC
  • Hybrid AI
  • Agentic AI

Catalin Caldararu

Technical AI Product Owner

LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)Experience

Hello, I am a Technical AI Product Owner with strong Applied AI, Delivery & Innovation skills. I can build and ship what I spec.

I've developed, owned, and shipped greenfield AI services featured at CES and DTW. These public services shipped to all Dell AI PC customers on two hardware platforms, reaching hundreds of thousands of total active users.

I've also originated and led the 0-to-1 delivery of an Applied AI Product Innovation (R&D) portfolio. I owned its backlog, business cases, PRDs, and roadmap, cutting the concepts that didn't fit the company's AI strategy. Through that work, I became the first-named inventor on 22 AI product patent applications.

I have delivered software with teams distributed across the Americas, Europe, and Asia, working cross-functionally with UX, DBA, DevSecOps, E2E, Support, Legal, Vendors and External Counsel from the start. I have a record of hunting down blockers and communicating trade-offs clearly to leadership.

From time to time I also act as a Trainer, striving to foster innovation and a culture of continuous learning, so the people behind the products grow alongside them.

Next Steps

I'm looking for a Technical AI Product Owner or AI Delivery role.

Credentials

Technical Overview

My depth is in Applied AI and full-stack delivery, so I can often ship working prototypes or production components by myself. Beyond that, I partner with specialists. Finding the right co-inventors and teammates is part of how I ship.

Technical Stack

Applied AI
LLM, SLM, ASR, and Embedding Models, AI Agents, MCP, RAG, Vector Databases, OpenAI SDK, ONNX, Hybrid Edge AI, Self-hosted and NPU/GPU Local AI Services
Back-end
.NET/C#, SQL, Python, FastAPI
Front-end
Next.js / React
Deployment
GitHub or GitLab CI/CD, Azure or Vercel

Recommendations

See my recommendations on LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)

Experience

Technical AI Product Owner

Self Employed, Self-employed

Sep 2026 - Present · 3 mos

Remote

AI tools for E-learning & Digital Asset Valuation.

  • Product Development
  • Applied AI

Technical AI Product Owner & Delivery Lead, R&D

Dell Technologies, Full-time

May 2025 - Aug 2026 · 1 yr 4 mos

Bucharest, Romania · Remote

Project
Applied AI Product Innovation Portfolio, a team of 10 working in Kanban.

Originated and led the 0-to-1 delivery of an Applied AI Product Innovation (R&D) portfolio, without being a people manager. It led to 22 patent applications with me as first-named inventor and consistently earned VP sponsorship through a competitive selection process.

Impact

  • Ranked as Dell Romania's most active inventor. I am also the first-named inventor on 13 other completed internal inventions that are currently being considered for engineering roadmaps.
  • Together with my architecture & innovation team of 9 co-inventors (Senior Engineers), built over 35 software feasibility prototypes across .NET/C#, Python, ONNX Runtime GenAI, OpenAI SDK, and Next.js.
  • Many of the portfolio's concepts were later handed over to engineering teams for hardening and now ship as production components through Dell's publicly disclosed AI-native product foundry.

Ownership

  • Originated product designs aligned with the company's public AI strategy: building AI into its products, applying AI to its internal systems and processes, and delivering AI with its partner ecosystem.
  • Owned the portfolio's backlog and a 4-phase research roadmap, along with the initiation deliverables for each concept: business cases, PRDs, and the initial AI solution architectures.
  • Owned a part of the research, solution design, product design and innovation feeding 8 products, a mix of commercial products and internal tools run by product managers.

Cross-team Delivery & People

  • Formed a team with 9 co-inventors (Senior Engineers) spread across 3 time zones, with specialists in Security, ML, Data Science, Infrastructure, and Hardware.
  • Led the meetings between the engineering team and our patent attorneys.
  • Product Development
  • Agile Application Development
  • Innovation Management
  • Applied AI
  • AI Agents
  • Hybrid AI

Software Developer & Delivery Lead, Hybrid AI

Dell Technologies, Full-time

May 2024 - Apr 2025 · 1 yr

Bucharest, Romania · Remote

Project
Hybrid AI Services, working in Scrum@Scale.

Joined a new division focused on AI product engineering.

Here I designed and built 7 OpenAI-compatible AI services from 0 to 1 as primary contributor. They shipped to every Dell AI PC customer on AMD and Qualcomm hardware, reached hundreds of thousands of total active users, and were featured at CES and DTW.

Impact

  • Within months of launch, every service was adopted by customers that couldn't use AI before due to privacy or costs.
  • Delivered Dell's first NPU-based ASR service from zero to production in 4 months, followed by Dell's first NPU-based ONNX SLM chat services on both platforms in 5 months.
  • Built 2 function-calling services, Dell's first on ONNX in production on both platforms, which enabled Agentic Edge AI across those AI PCs. They stayed the default for a year, strengthening data privacy and eliminating recurring cloud costs.

Ownership

  • Owned most of the conversational AI engineering scope on AMD hardware, and half of the conversational AI scope on Qualcomm.
  • Owned the services end to end: research, testing, model validation (MMLU/WER), packaging and deployment, building on existing DevOps templates. Used mostly pre-optimized models, plus a few I exported myself with vendor-specific tooling.

Cross-team Delivery & People

  • Coordinated the day-to-day delivery for a squad of 5 mid-level and senior product engineers new to Edge AI, each owning their own services.
  • Cleared the squad's impediments and resolved cross-team dependencies and integration defects, working with external vendors and 5 partner Scrum teams (ML, HW, Consumers) across 4 time zones.
  • Onboarded 2 new developers and coached them in on-device AI. Both became core members of the division.
  • Applied AI
  • Hybrid AI
  • Generative AI
  • Agile Application Development

Software Developer, APIs

Dell Technologies, Full-time

May 2023 - Apr 2024 · 1 yr

Bucharest, Romania · Remote

Project
Web Platform Modernization, one of 20+ teams in a Digital Transformation Program run with SAFe.

After my promotion to mid-level, coordinated the day-to-day delivery for my squad of 4 recent joiners and interns, escalating risks to my EM, who managed 8 squads.

Impact

  • Together with my squad, built from scratch the .NET Web API services behind 3 operator-facing modules. From release, they were used by all of Dell's factory engineers across the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, retiring the legacy ones.
  • Led the adoption of HashiCorp Vault across part of the division, eliminating secret sprawl in 60 service instances.
  • Led the adoption of a new observability and tracing solution across part of the division, with all 60 of its service instances traced and monitored.
  • Led the migration of 60 service instances between data centers and optimized their resource allocation, so development could continue without extra spend.

Ownership

  • Managed the GitLab CI/CD pipelines for the broader team's 15 microservices. Also traced and triaged issues across them, fixing many myself and assigning the rest to the appropriate people.

Cross-team Delivery & People

  • Planned releases with the EM, PDM, and TPM, and was the development point of contact for testing teams, UAT, and 8 consuming teams, working across 4 time zones to resolve cross-team dependencies and integration defects.
  • Supported the PDM in backlog refinement by adding technical details to the squad's user stories and tasks, based on planning discussions and, at times, on input from internal business stakeholders.
  • Coached juniors and interns on testing and CI/CD, keeping the squad's unit and integration test coverage consistently above 80%.
  • Onboarded 7 developers: 2 interns who were hired as full-time juniors, a senior who later became team lead, and 4 juniors across the program.
  • Web Development
  • Cloud Computing
  • Agile Application Development
  • Coaching & Mentoring

Junior Software Developer, APIs

Dell Technologies, Full-time

Aug 2021 - Apr 2023 · 1 yr 9 mos

Bucharest, Romania · Remote

Project
.NET Rotation across 4 Scrum teams in a Digital Transformation Program of 20+ teams.

Had the chance to work with 10 principal-level engineers who cared about juniors and knew how to assign ownership without burning people out. Owned my first production service within 6 months, and three within 9 months.

  • Built .NET Web APIs used by 6 teams and automated their testing and deployment with GitLab CI/CD pipelines.
  • Monitored and remediated vulnerabilities and code quality issues using Snyk and SonarQube.
  • Applied Extreme Programming (XP) practices such as TDD, pair programming, and refactoring.
  • Worked with business users and supported delivery and UAT efforts while shipping, which had a positive impact on the project's budget and timeline.
  • Took part in 8 major releases before my promotion to mid-level.
  • Web Development
  • Cloud Computing
  • Agile Application Development

IT Human Resources Member

SiSC - Sindicatul Studenților din Cibernetică

Oct 2018 - Sep 2021 · 3 yrs

Hybrid

Recruited and coached students across 10 projects that prepared them for their first IT jobs.

  • Training
  • Coaching & Mentoring

Software Developer Intern

Suvoda, Internship

Oct 2020 - Dec 2020 · 3 mos

Bucharest, Romania · Remote

Learned software development principles and took part in building IRT systems with .NET.

  • Web Development
  • Agile Application Development

Education