25 years of Constructors: Irina Calciu- the AI Architect

In honor of Constructor University's 25th anniversary, we're featuring alumni from past graduating classes to showcase the diversity, values and impact that Constructor graduates have carried into the world. You can find all our alumni interviews on the 25th Anniversary web page.

This week, we spoke with Irina Calciu, a Computer Science major from the Class of 2009 who is now designing agentic AI infrastructure as a founding systems architect at Pervaziv AI.

While much of her life and career has been dedicated to advancing artificial intelligence, Irina's affinity for human connection and collaboration has been the north star that guided her from Bucharest to Silicon Valley, USA, via a certain small, international university in Bremen, Germany. Irina credits the international and multicultural environment at Constructor University (then Jacobs University) for equipping her to work together and produce great things with diverse teams of people, something that has benefited her career as much as the technical expertise she's acquired.

Irina would go on to complete a PhD in computer science at American Ivy League Brown University, before relocating to California's Silicon Valley to advance emerging AI technologies with large tech companies, research labs and startups. She founded her first startup Graft in 2021, and recently became the founding systems architect at Pervaziv AI, which is developing advanced agentic AI for multi-cloud environments.

We connected with Irina to talk about the true value of internationality and why human connection is still the key to navigating the AI age.

QUICK FACTS:

• College: I started in Mercator, moved to College 3, and then briefly lived in Nordmetall right after it opened!
• A big news story from my student years: Romania joining the European Union in 2007, which significantly simplified my paperwork!
• One course that's helped me  in my career: Algorithms and data structures  
• One course that still gives me nightmares: Economics
• My proudest moment: realizing that I could move from learning computer science to contributing to the field, through research and building novel systems

Decision-making is a central theme of our 25th anniversary campaign. Which decisions have had the most significant impact on your life?

The decision with the greatest impact was probably choosing Jacobs (now Constructor) University in the first place. I came from Bucharest to study computer science in an international environment and to be surrounded by people who saw the world differently than me. Jacobs offered that in a very concentrated form: a small campus, ambitious students from around the world and close access to faculty.

A second important decision was to build a strong foundation in the fundamentals of computer science. That foundation carried me through a PhD at Brown University, research roles in the industry and eventually into building an AI company.

I am also proud that I pursued opportunities beyond the usual curriculum, including undergraduate research, industry internships and an exchange semester at Carnegie Mellon. These experiences made the possibilities ahead feel more tangible and guided me towards my PhD, and later, a career in research.

Looking back, I would worry less about what came next and take more time to appreciate the moment.  

What aspect of your experience at Jacobs had the most beneficial impact on your career?

The international community. At Jacobs, you could have a serious conversation over dinner with someone whose upbringing, assumptions and ambitions were completely different from your own. That has proven to be enormously valuable in my career, which has moved across large technology companies, research labs and startups. In each setting, the ability to work productively with people who approach a problem differently than you has mattered as much as technical ability. Jacobs made that kind of intellectual and cultural openness feel normal very early on.

Thinking about today’s global challenges and looking forward to the next 25 years, what kind of legacy do you think Constructor University will have or should have in the world?

This is a timely question as we reflect on how AI is changing every part of life, including education. In the age of AI, I think universities should remain grounded in creating opportunities for human connection. We need universities that can educate students to engage deeply with difficult problems while understanding and evaluating their human impact. We need people to ask: who benefits and who is left out? How do we make systems trustworthy and equitable so that everyone can benefit?

Constructor’s distinctive opportunity is to bring together talented students from around the world and give them both the technical foundation and international perspective to answer those questions. Its legacy should be graduates who don’t just adapt to change, but help shape it responsibly.

After graduating from Jacobs, you went on to complete a PhD at Brown University, a highly regarded Ivy League institution. How did that experience compare to the smaller, international setting at Jacobs?

It’s difficult to make an apples-to-apples comparison because I pursued different degrees at the two universities: undergraduate studies at Jacobs and a PhD at Brown.  

What was particularly distinctive about Jacobs was the way its international character extended far beyond the classroom. I still remember the "Country Information Days" very fondly. Students would share their respective cultures through presentations, food, music and history, giving each of us a window into places we might otherwise have known very little about. Those experiences taught me a lot and made cultural exchange a part of my everyday university life.

That’s something larger universities could especially benefit from: creating intentional opportunities for students to celebrate cultural diversity, and to learn from their history and traditions. At Jacobs, internationalism was an active part of our education.

As someone working at the forefront of the AI space, what advice would you share with up-and-coming students and young professionals who may be feeling wary or even cynical of AI's growing role in the marketplace and society? What can the next generation of computer science and tech professionals be doing to adapt and thrive in the age of AI?

A healthy degree of skepticism is useful. AI is powerful, but it’s not magic, and it’s not a substitute for sound judgment, responsibility or understanding the systems we build.

My advice is to focus on the fundamentals: understand systems, data and the real constraints of deploying technology. AI can then be used as a tool to extend these capabilities. The people who will thrive in this era are those who learn to use these tools well without blindly relying on them.

When you think about the frontiers of computer science and where it may go in the next 2-5 years, what do you find most compelling?

It's a great time to be working at the frontier of computer science! For me, one of the most compelling areas is the design of reliable and efficient systems for increasingly autonomous AI agents. Models are improving rapidly, but agents that reason across multiple steps, use tools and act on data are introducing new systems challenges.

Connecting them to robots raises the stakes because they must translate high-level goals into safe physical actions and respond to an unpredictable environment. We need scalable and efficient ways to manage state, coordinate agents, enforce permissions, observe their behavior, control resource consumption, and recover safely from failures.

Fascinating times indeed. Thank you Irina!