Catalin Caldararu

• Created from zero a VP-sponsored 35-item software product prototype portfolio (inventions), and filed 22 patent applications as first-named inventor, ranking as the most active inventor at Dell's Romania site and in the top 10% company-wide.
• Owned the backlog, business cases, PRDs, draft solution architectures, and a 4-phase R&D roadmap. Won 7 Principal Engineers as voluntary co-inventors, and ran the effort as a self-managing team with no manager.
• Pitched each invention to engineering and legal leadership, converting approved concepts into patent applications with 4 patent attorneys.
• Built prototypes myself: on-device agent loops using ONNX Runtime GenAI, with cloud fallbacks through the OpenAI API. Where needed, also built Blazor, WPF, and Next.js front-ends, CI/CD pipelines, and Windows installers (WiX).
• Owned and built from zero all 6 OpenAI-compatible conversational AI services (SLM/ASR) across two silicon platforms, running inference on NPUs and GPUs. These services powered Dell AI PC capabilities featured at CES and Dell Technologies World.
• Enabled internal teams and customers to add SLM and ASR to their AI Apps by pointing existing OpenAI client code at a local endpoint, cutting the time from PoC to production by ~80%, increasing privacy, and removing recurring cloud costs.
• Built the accuracy, latency, and safety test suites (MMLU, WER) that vetted every model behind those endpoints.
• Facilitated the Daily Scrum and weekly design-thinking sessions with engineers, resolving cross-team dependencies with external vendors and 5 partner Scrum teams.

(Stats per IDiyas Public Statistics)

• Owned 8 .NET Web APIs, developing them end to end, planning releases with the EM, PO and RTE, and resolving cross-team dependencies and integration defects as point of contact for testing teams and 10 downstream partner Scrum teams.
• Ensured all deliverables met the program's non-functional requirements (NFRs), while owning the team's CI/CD (GitLab), observability, and defect triage.
• Facilitated the Daily Scrum, onboarding 7 developers of varying experience levels across the program, and upskilling teammates on our modules and the platform they shipped into.