Catalin Caldararu

• 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. Also built the accuracy, latency, and safety test suites (MMLU, WER) that vetted every model behind those endpoints.
• Created from zero a 35-item product prototype portfolio, 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.
• Built prototypes myself, running agent loops on-device across NPUs and GPUs using ONNX Runtime GenAI, with cloud fallbacks through the OpenAI API. Where needed, also built Blazor, WPF, and Next.js front-ends, plus the CI/CD pipelines and Windows installers (WiX).
• 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 converted approved concepts into filings with 4 patent attorneys.
• 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, and resolving cross-team dependencies and integration defects as point of contact for testing teams and 10 downstream partner Scrum teams.
• Led the adoption of GitLab CI/CD, HashiCorp Vault and Dynatrace across 120 service instances (30 services, 4 environments), automating builds and releases, eliminating secret sprawl, and bringing observability coverage to 100%.
• Facilitated the Daily Scrum for a 5-person team for two years, onboarding 7 developers of varying experience levels, and upskilling teammates on our modules and the platform they shipped into.