Catalin Caldararu

Originated a 35-invention Applied AI portfolio from zero, 22 of which advanced to filed patent applications. 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. Together we invented across 8 domains: Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC. Worked as both product owner and developer on the portfolio. Originated each invention and defined its business case and strategy, designed the solution architecture, then hardened that architecture with the Principal Engineers in the domains it was being designed into. Owned the backlog, set the strategy, ran a Kanban flow, and pitched every invention to engineering and legal leaders, including formal reviewers. Produced PRDs complete enough for an engineering team or a coding assistant to implement with minimal oversight, then converted them into filed applications with 4 patent attorneys reviewing and approving each. Ran the initiative as a self-managing team, with no manager and no assigned requirements, reporting to a VP-level sponsoring organization that owned budgets, engineering roadmap, and engineering execution. Competitively funded and rewarded on results, sustained this initiative over two years alongside full-time delivery. It started as a way to learn AI and turned into a steady source of redesigns for existing applications and ideas for new products.

(Stats per IDiyas Public Statistics)

Moved to a new business unit where I owned and built 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. Also built the accuracy, latency, and safety test suites (MMLU, WER) that benchmarked every candidate SLM and ASR model ahead of shipping. The SLM service supports both chat and function-calling, and each service is the only Dell service of its kind on that hardware, supporting inference on NPUs and GPUs. Over time, took on work across the wider program, contributing to services spanning all four silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel). 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. It reached production use within months of launch, including by IT professionals building Agentic Edge AI applications and organizations with privacy-first requirements. Facilitated the Daily Scrum for a 5-person inference team for a year, upskilled teammates in on-device AI and the product it shipped into, reported progress and impediments to internal and external leadership, and resolved defects and dependencies working with hardware vendors and three partner Scrum teams (ML, DevOps, and a consumer team).

Enterprise .NET web platform, delivered within a 20+ team scaled Scrum modernization program. Built a custom Jira-like work management system and the underlying task model, replacing a workflow fragmented across the legacy monoliths. Also built the operator-facing execution interface, consolidating the instructions operators need to complete a task from 4 sources into one view and replacing navigation across 5 screens. Owned the configuration service supplying the parameters that downstream systems needed to execute the platform's specialized task types. Also owned the data aggregation service that gives external partners a single outbound interface to feed their own work management systems. Contributed to replacing 6 legacy modules with modern services, improving performance and UX. Monitored service quality across environments and triaged defects across the ecosystem, resolving most issues before they reached production. Ensured the team's NFR compliance across CI/CD automation, integration testing, security, and observability. Facilitated the Daily Scrum for a 5-person team for a year, onboarded 7 developers of varying experience levels, upskilled teammates on our modules and the platform they shipped into, and resolved defects and dependencies working with peers from 10 other Scrum teams.