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 PO/PM for Applied AI, Hybrid AI and Edge AI initiatives.
• Proxy PO inside large AI programs, so senior leaders stay focused on scaling and strategy while delivery stays on track.
• Advisor to functional leaders on AI product strategy, assessing whether an AI initiative is a sustaining or disruptive play, and if it even makes financial sense.

A short contract continuing my Dell work, driving the innovation portfolio development until the final 13 patent applications are filed.

This was the Product R&D and Product 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. The portfolio protects both the platform and its integrations with 8 applications across the organization, as they exist today and as they evolve.

• Led a newly formed 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 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.
• 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.
• Authored solution architectures and PRDs 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 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.

• Translated direction and priorities from the Engineering Manager and Product Owner into execution, and 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 and Blazor front-ends.