Catalin Caldararu

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

• Technical Product Owner for focused AI initiatives.
• Proxy PO within large AI initiatives, so senior leaders can concentrate on strategy and scaling.
• AI product strategy advisor for executives and functional leaders.

A short inventorship contract to complete my remaining Dell work, driving the Applied AI patent portfolio until the final 13 applications are filed and ownership is formally assigned to Dell.

This was half of a product engineering role, focused on product R&D and IP development. The two halves reinforce each other: the Hybrid AI platform is where my inventions are implemented and proven, and the patent portfolio sustains the platform and its integrations across 8 existing applications. The inventions span the following domains: Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.

• Led a newly formed Product Innovation workstream, initiating and managing a 35-item Applied AI patent application portfolio as an R&D product: 22 applications filed, 13 in development.
• Owned the portfolio's backlog and strategy as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications.
• Drove the portfolio's development, working remotely with a global team of 10 co-inventors and multiple attorneys.
• Incrementally secured $1M in funding by refining the invention backlog and presenting business cases to Software Engineering and Legal leaders, becoming an Innovation Lead and the top inventor at Dell's Romania site.
• Authored PRDs and solution architectures for 35 differentiated AI product concepts, enabling independent engineering or spec-driven AI execution.
• Personally built and shipped the core Hybrid AI services referenced in my patent applications.

This was half of a product engineering role, focused on hands-on AI platform development. 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 Dell's CTO organization, and reported progress to internal and external stakeholders, including directors, Distinguished Engineers, and Fellows.

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

• Designed and developed 3 modules spanning 6 .NET APIs and 2 React front-ends.
• Removed blockers and refined stories together with the Product Owner.
• Onboarded 5 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 and Blazor front-ends.