People & CultureByte Size15min
Burnout: The Hidden Failure Mode of High-Performing Teams
This talk applies systems engineering and SRE principles to team health, arguing that running teams at full capacity creates systemic burnout risk. It advocates for practices like load shedding and visible cognitive load, promoting “idle capacity” to build resilient, high-performing teams without relying on unsustainable heroics or risking burnout.
Diana NanutiChainalysis
"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.
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.
Diana Nanuti
Diana Nanuti is a Senior Software Engineer at Chainalysis and a 2025 UK Gold Winner at Women in Tech Global Awards. Specializing in Cloud Infrastructure and Data Engineering, she architects the resilient, scalable systems essential for high-stakes blockchain intelligence. Her expertise lies in building mission-critical infrastructure leveraging cloud-native and open-source technologies. At Chainalysis, Diana ensures the platform’s backbone operates with absolute precision for institutional-grade adoption, while her commitment to engineering excellence and psychological safety continues to influence the wider technical community.
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