Catalin Caldararu

AI Software Developer — Applied AI, Edge AI, Hybrid AI, Agentic AI, .NET AI Systems

First-named inventor on 22 Applied AI patent applications

Hello, I am an AI Software Developer with a proven record of product innovation and delivery.

I have hands-on experience across .NET AI Systems and Applied AI, including Edge AI, Hybrid AI, and Agentic AI.

As first-named inventor on 22 Applied AI patent applications, I strive to embed collaborative innovation and learning into the software delivery lifecycle, so the products and teams I work with don't just ship, they grow and remain relevant in changing markets.

I'm also an advanced Agile practitioner (PSPO II & PSM II Certified). I've applied Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming (XP) inside real AI initiatives.

I am open to remote B2B/B2C engagements and full-time roles.

Top Skills

  • Innovation Strategy

  • AI Product Delivery

  • AI Development

Experience

AI Software Developer, Innovation Team Lead

Dell Technologies, Part-timeMay 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 3 mosBucharest, Romania · Remote

Alongside full-time delivery, sustained an AI Product Innovation initiative for two years: optional, competitively funded, and rewarded on results. The scope covered redesigning existing applications and identifying new products worth building. The invention team was self-managing, with no manager and no assigned requirements, answering only to the VP-level sponsoring organization that owned budgets, engineering roadmap, and engineering execution.

Key outcomes:

  • Built a 35-invention Applied AI portfolio from zero, 22 of which advanced to filed patent applications. (Company-issued proof available on request)
  • Filed all 22 as first-named inventor, ranking as the most active inventor at Dell's Romania site and in the top 10% company-wide.
  • Attracted 9 Principal Engineers as co-inventors in their own domains, with no authority requiring them to join.
  • Invented across 8 domains: Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
  • The company committed roughly $600k to protecting the portfolio.

Responsibilities:

  • Originated the inventions, defining the business case and strategy for each.
  • Defined the solution architecture for each invention, then hardened it with those Principal Engineers in the domains being designed into.
  • Managed the R&D portfolio while also developing: owned the backlog, set the strategy, and ran a Kanban flow.
  • Created PRDs complete enough for an engineering team or a coding assistant to implement with minimal oversight.
  • Converted PRDs into filed applications with 4 patent attorneys, reviewing and approving each.
  • Pitched every invention to engineering and legal leaders, including formal reviewers.

(Stats per IDiyas Public Statistics)

Applied AIAI AgentsProduct ManagementInnovation ManagementProduct InnovationProduct StrategyProduct Research

AI Software Developer, Hybrid AI

Dell Technologies, Full-timeMay 2024 - May 2026 · 2 yrs 1 moBucharest, Romania · Remote

Moved to a new business unit, working across two 5-person Scrum teams within two AI initiatives.

Key outcomes:

  • Sole engineer for the function-calling SLM and ASR services across two silicon platforms in a Hybrid AI product featured at CES and Dell Technologies World, shipping to every Dell AI PC customer.
  • Built the API layer exposing existing AI services in a second product, also featured at CES and shipping to all Dell AI PC customers.
  • Delivered Dell's first NPU-based ASR service from zero to production in 4 months.
  • Took both types of services to production on a second silicon platform in 7 months, each the only Dell service of its kind on that hardware, supporting inference on NPUs, GPUs, and CPUs.
  • With the team, delivered an integration layer that let internal teams and customers add SLM and ASR to their applications without building inference stacks themselves, keeping data on-device and cutting cloud inference costs.
  • Services reached production use within months of launch, including by IT professionals and organizations with privacy-first requirements.

Responsibilities:

  • Built the accuracy, latency, and safety test suites (MMLU, WER) that benchmarked every candidate SLM and ASR model ahead of shipping.
  • Resolved defects and dependencies with hardware vendors and three partner Scrum teams (ML, DevOps, and a consumer team).
  • Caught quality degradation early by monitoring service performance across successive hardware, driver, and dependency versions, then re-optimizing before it reached customers.
  • Upskilled colleagues across the program on on-device AI, contributing to services spanning all four silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel).
  • Reported progress and impediments to internal and external leadership, including directors and Fellows.
  • Ran Daily Scrum for the 5-person inference team for a year.
AI InferencingEdge ComputingONNXEdge AIOpenAI SDKHybrid AIGenerative AISmall Language Models (SLMs)Speech Recognition

Software Developer, Web Services

Dell Technologies, Full-timeAug 2021 - Apr 2024 · 2 yrs 9 mosBucharest, Romania · Remote

Enterprise .NET web platform enabling large customers to order fully configured PCs, delivered within a 20+ team scaled Scrum modernization program.

Key outcomes:

  • Replaced 6 legacy modules with modern services, improving performance and UX.
  • Onboarded 7 developers of varying experience levels, expanding the team's delivery capacity.
  • Adopted GitHub Copilot as an early user and drove adoption across my team ahead of the company-wide rollout, leading to my move into the AI division.

Responsibilities:

  • Owned the service supplying the system configuration data that drove the install system's imaging decisions.
  • Owned the data aggregation service that external partners integrate against, providing a single interface for outbound company data.
  • Built the operator-facing assembly instruction service, consolidating instructions from 4 sources into one interface and replacing navigation across 5 screens in the legacy monoliths.
  • Built the coordination service enabling factory team leads to manage work across the floor, along with the underlying task model, replacing a workflow similarly fragmented across the monoliths.
  • Ensured the team's NFR compliance across CI/CD automation, integration testing, security, and observability.
  • Drove delivery strategy for a 12-person team as one of 4 core developers, working with the 10 teams consuming our services.
  • Monitored service quality across environments and triaged defects across the ecosystem, resolving most issues before they reached production.
  • Took over GitLab CI/CD after the team's DevOps engineer left, maintaining pipeline and release automation with no replacement hire.
Web DevelopmentCloud ComputingAgile Application DevelopmentCI/CDSQL

Education

  • Harvard Business School Online

    Certificate of Specialization, Entrepreneurship & Innovation

    Apr 2026 – Jul 2026

    A 16-week, 100-hour online specialization program spanning three modules: Disruptive Strategy, Transforming Customer Experiences, Design Thinking and Innovation

    Skills:StrategyCustomer ExperienceDesign ThinkingProduct InnovationInnovation Management

  • Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Computer Science, ASE Bucharest

    Master's degree, IT Solutions for Management

    Sep 2021 – Jul 2023

    Skills:Agile Application DevelopmentData-driven Decision MakingProject Management

  • Faculty of Economic Cybernetics, Statistics and Computer Science, ASE Bucharest

    Bachelor's degree, Computer Science for Business

    Oct 2018 – Jul 2021

    Skills:Web DevelopmentDesktop DevelopmentMobile Application Development

Certifications