Catalin Caldararu

I am open to remote B2B contracts and full-time roles. I work at the intersection of innovation, product and engineering.

Driving the portfolio development until the final 13 inventions are handed off to the legal team for filing.

This was the Product R&D and Innovation half of a single product engineering role. This work is part of the sustaining innovation strategy for a commercial Hybrid AI platform featured at CES, protecting both the platform and its integrations with 8 applications across the organization, as they exist today and as they evolve.

• Initiated and led a Product Innovation workstream, originating and managing a 35-item Applied AI patent application portfolio as an R&D product: 22 applications filed, 13 in development.
• The inventions span 8 domains: Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
• Incrementally secured $1M in funding by presenting business cases for all 35 concepts to Software Engineering and Legal leaders, becoming an Innovation Lead and the top inventor at Dell's Romania site.
• As Technical AI PO for a research initiative focused on unreleased capabilities and future products, originated the requirements for all 35 AI product concepts, defining both their solution architectures and PRDs.
• Owned the portfolio's backlog and strategy as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications.
• Drove the portfolio's development, assembling invention teams of ~4 around each concept's domain from a global pool of 10 co-inventors, and refining the inventions with them and multiple attorneys.
• Personally built and shipped the core Hybrid AI services referenced in my patent applications.

This was the engineering half of a single product engineering role. I developed core conversational services (SLM and ASR) powering a commercial, user-facing Hybrid AI platform featured at CES. This involved significant research and zero-to-one development. In the second year, I also served as Proxy Product Owner for a 5-person feature team focused on Hybrid AI inference and as interim Scrum Master for 4 months.

• Developed AI services end-to-end on 2 of 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel) and contributed to the other 2. These services ship to all Dell AI PC customers across both enterprise and consumer environments.
• Built test suites for measuring accuracy, latency, and safety of candidate SLM and ASR models on task-specific benchmarks. These tests determined which models shipped.
• Delivered foundational components enabling internal teams and customers to build Hybrid and Agentic Edge AI applications across heterogeneous hardware and AI PC fleets.
• Tracked the team's progress, created and assigned tasks, removed blockers, and resolved defects and dependencies directly with hardware vendors.
• Negotiated scope with senior leadership, including Engineering and Product Leaders from Dell's CTO organization.
• Reported progress to internal and external stakeholders, including directors, Distinguished Engineers, and Fellows.

Worked as both developer and Scrum Master for a 4-person feature team in a scaled modernization program spanning 10+ teams.

• Refined user stories with enough technical and domain context for independent execution.
• Supported the Scrum team in delivering a usable increment each sprint.
• Designed and developed 3 modules spanning 6 .NET APIs and 2 React front-ends.
• Planned releases, removed blockers, and refined stories ahead of each sprint.
• Onboarded 4 developers with various levels of experience, enabling the team to take on more work.
• Ensured deliverables met non-functional requirements across automation, security, accessibility, observability, secret management, and performance.
• Reduced technical debt through static code analysis, refactoring, code reviews, and pair programming.
• 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.

• Built .NET APIs and GitLab CI/CD pipelines in collaboration with 8 other teams.
• Integrated APIs into React, Blazor and WPF front-ends.