Catalin Caldararu

I'm no longer full-time at Dell. For now, I work across three engagements.

• First, an inventorship contract for my remaining Dell work, driving my Applied AI patent portfolio until the final 13 applications are filed.
• Second, a short advisory contract where I help executives with Hybrid AI product strategy.
• Third, an engagement where I manage and develop AI tooling for market research and monitoring.

This was half of a product engineering role, the other half was hands-on AI development on a commercial Hybrid AI product. As part of it, I led a newly formed Product Innovation workstream, growing from zero to one a 35-item Applied AI patent application portfolio focused on Hybrid AI: 22 filed, 13 in development. I managed the portfolio as a R&D product where the outcomes are patent applications designed to generate revenue, sustain the company's AI hardware offerings through software, and protect against disruption.

• Originated the portfolio as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications, working with 10 co-inventors and multiple attorneys to develop and protect novel product concepts.
• Defined the solution architecture for all 22 applications, enabling independent engineering or spec-driven AI execution.
• Incrementally secured $1M in Product R&D funding, becoming an Innovation Lead and the top inventor at Dell's Romania site.
• Authored PRDs for 35 differentiated AI product concepts spanning Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Digital Wellness, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
• Applied systematic inventive thinking (SIT) to generate patentable product concepts and propose future states for 8 existing products.
• Defined sustaining or disruptive innovation strategies for the products represented in my patents and presented them to stakeholders.
• Prioritized, refined, and dropped ideas from the invention backlog based on their current value, unrealized value, time to market, and ability to innovate.

This was half of a product engineering role, the other half was owning and driving an Applied AI patent application portfolio. As part of it, I developed core conversational services (SLM and ASR) that power a commercial, user-facing Hybrid AI platform featured at CES. This has involved significant research and zero to one development.

• Developed AI services end-to-end on 2 of the 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel) and contributed to services for the other 2. My services ship to all Dell AI PC customers across both enterprise and consumer environments.
• Delivered foundational components that enable internal teams and customers to build Hybrid and Agentic Edge AI applications across heterogenous hardware and AI PC fleets.
• 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, negotiated scope, tracked the team's progress against goals, and proactively removed blockers.

Worked as both developer and Scrum Master for a 5-person feature team in the same scaled modernization program spanning 10+ teams.

• Removed blockers and refined stories together with the Product Owner. This included 3 modules that were assigned to me and new developers.
• Onboarded 5 developers with various levels of experience, enabling the team to take on more work.
• Collaborated directly with customers (internal stakeholders) and supported cross-team UAT/E2E defect triage on rotation.

Contributed to a multi-year modernization program that replaced several legacy applications with one unified, greenfield enterprise platform. As part of it, I built .NET microservices, front-ends (React, Blazor, WPF), and GitLab CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with 8 other teams.