Catalin Caldararu

Accelerating AI innovation for clients as an independent Technical AI Product Owner.

• Advised functional leaders on AI product strategy in an engagement focused on local AI.
• Originated, built and shipped a Local AI Acquisition Decision Support System, running at near-zero marginal cost per query (details under Projects).

Driving the portfolio development until the final 13 inventions are handed off to the legal team for filing.

This was the Product R&D and 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 and Dell Technologies World. Its scope is to protect both the platform and its integrations with 8 applications across the organization, as they exist today and as they evolve.

• Initiated and led a 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 presenting business cases for all 35 concepts to Software Engineering and Legal leaders, becoming an Innovation Lead and the top inventor at Dell's Romania site.
• As Technical AI PO for a research initiative focused on unreleased capabilities and future products, originated the requirements for all 35 AI product concepts, defining both their solution architectures and PRDs.
• Owned the portfolio's backlog and strategy as first-named inventor on all 22 filed applications.
• Drove the portfolio's development, assembling invention teams of ~4 around each concept's domain from a global pool of 10 co-inventors, and refining the inventions with them and multiple attorneys.
• Personally built and shipped the core Hybrid AI services referenced in my patent applications.
• Coached colleagues on Applied AI and the invention process, and presented innovation topics to the team inheriting the workstream.

This was the engineering half of a single product engineering role, involving significant research and zero-to-one development. I was part of the core team of a commercial Hybrid AI platform featured at CES and Dell Technologies World. The platform achieved customer adoption within months, and ships to all Dell AI PC customers.

• Sole engineer for 6 inference services spanning two silicon vendors, including the default conversational services (SLM and ASR), which were at release the most performant Dell services for these targets.
• Contributed to inference services across NPUs, GPUs and CPUs and across all 4 silicon targets (AMD, Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Intel).
• Built test suites 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.
• As interim Scrum Master for 4 months, 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 and Fellows.

Worked as both developer and Scrum Master for a 4-person feature team in a scaled modernization program spanning 10+ teams.

• Refined user stories with enough technical and domain context for independent execution.
• 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.

Contributed to a multi-year modernization program that replaced several legacy applications with one unified, greenfield enterprise platform.

• Developed .NET APIs and integrated them into React, Blazor, and WPF front-ends.
• Automated tests and deployments with GitLab CI/CD pipelines.

Contributed to 13 educational projects that prepared students for their first IT jobs.

• Coached and mentored new team members.
• Held 1-1s to support the members' growth and the organization's development.
• Recruited candidates for the organization and partner internship programs.