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.

• 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.
• Originated the portfolio as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications, working remotely with 10 co-inventors and multiple attorneys to develop and protect novel product concepts.
• Incrementally secured $1M in funding by refining the invention backlog, becoming an Innovation Lead and the top inventor at Dell's Romania site.
• Authored PRDs for 35 differentiated AI product concepts spanning Security, Privacy, Resilience, Efficiency, Accessibility, Personalization, Digital Wellness, Automation, and Agent-Native SDLC.
• Defined the solution architecture for all 22 applications, enabling independent engineering or spec-driven AI execution.
• Defined sustaining or disruptive innovation strategies for the products represented in my patents and presented them to stakeholders.
• Personally built and shipped the core Hybrid AI services that are referenced in my patent applications.

This was half of a product engineering role, focused on hands-on AI platform development. As part of it, I developed core conversational services (SLM and ASR) that power a commercial, user-facing Hybrid AI platform featured at CES. This has 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 the 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel) and contributed to services for the other 2. My services ship to all Dell AI PC customers across both enterprise and consumer environments.
• Built evaluation tests measuring accuracy, latency, and safety of candidate SLM and ASR models on task-specific benchmarks. These evaluations determined which models shipped.
• Delivered foundational components that enable internal teams and customers to build Hybrid and Agentic Edge AI applications across heterogeneous hardware and AI PC fleets.
• Created, refined, and assigned tasks and user stories to the development team while contributing significantly to the implementation.
• Negotiated scope with senior leadership, including Dell's CTO organization and Software Engineering leaders.
• Removed blockers and kept delivery on track, resolving defects and dependencies by working directly with hardware vendors.
• Represented the team to external partners, reporting progress to directors, Principal Engineers, and Fellow Engineers.

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.
• Addressed non-functional requirements including automation, vulnerability remediation, 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.