High-Performing Teams & Architecture with Diana Nanuti

1830 - Arrive
1850 - Intro
1900 - Burnout: The Hidden Failure Mode of High-Performing Teams
1945 - Break
2000 - Designing for Change: How Domain-Driven Design and Hexagonal Architecture can help systems evolve
2045 - Finish

Burnout: The Hidden Failure Mode of High-Performing Teams
Is your team’s health as observable as your software?

High-performing engineering teams are celebrated for their velocity and "whatever it takes" commitment. Yet, these same traits often make them the most vulnerable to a predictable, systemic failure mode: burnout.

This isn’t a lack of individual grit; it’s a design flaw. When we architect software for 99.9% uptime but run our teams at 100% capacity, we create a system with zero fault tolerance. In this talk, we move beyond the superficial "resiliency" narrative and analyze team health through the lens of systems engineering.

We will explore how to apply SRE principles (like load shedding, redundancy mechanisms, and leading indicators) to the human element of the stack. You’ll learn why "idle capacity" is the secret to low latency, how to make cognitive load visible, and how to build a system where high performance doesn't require a "hero culture" destined for a catastrophic outage.

Designing for Change: How Domain-Driven Design and Hexagonal Architecture can help systems evolve
As products grow, change becomes harder. New ideas take longer to ship, technical decisions feel risky, and systems start pushing back when teams try to evolve them.
This session looks at how Domain-Driven Design and Hexagonal Architecture help teams design software that can change over time. Through a concrete example, we’ll explore how clear boundaries and a well-defined core make it easier to evolve both the system and the
product, whether that means adding new features, integrating AI, changing cloud providers, or adapting infrastructure choices.

Key learnings:

• How clear domain boundaries make systems easier to understand, change, and explain to others
• Practical ways to structure software through a real example, so products can evolve
• without rewrites
• How architectural boundaries help teams introduce new technologies with less risk
• Techniques for reducing long-term lock-in to frameworks, cloud providers, or platforms
• Common design choices that seem fine early on but make change harder later

By the end of the session, attendees will leave with practical ideas they can apply immediately to design software that can evolve alongside their product, teams, and technology.

Diana Nanuti
https://www.linkedin.com/in/dianananuti/

Diana Nanuti is a Senior Software Engineer at Chainalysis and a 2025 UK Gold Winner at the Women in Tech Global Awards. She specializes in cloud infrastructure and data engineering, architecting the resilient, institutional-grade systems that power high-stakes blockchain intelligence.

At Chainalysis, Diana ensures the core blockchain data platform operates with the precision and performance required by global financial institutions and law enforcement. Her work focuses on building mission-critical, cloud-native platforms where reliability and security are non-negotiable.

Beyond the code, Diana is a public speaker and mentor dedicated to engineering excellence without burnout. A champion for compassionate leadership and psychological safety, she helps teams and individuals bridge the gap between high-performance technical output and sustainable human culture.