THE DURABLE EXECUTION CONFERENCE FOR AI, BY TEMPORAL

MAY 5-7, 2026

SAN FRANCISCO, CA

_/  SPEAKERS  / 

SPEAKER DISPLAY

Shabnam Emdadi

Shabnam Emdadi

TITLE:Staff Engineer

COMPANY:Shopify

STATUS UPDATE

Shabnam Emdadi is a Staff Engineer on the Shop team at Shopify, where she builds reliable, scalable systems that power the shopping experience for millions of consumers. Previously, she worked on merchant communications in Shopify’s Growth organization, led product platform initiatives at Peloton, and spent five years at Uber working on Uber Eats, Uber Elevate, Driver Product, and Money Platform.

TALK

From Normalizing Complexity to Recognizing the Price

ABSTRACT

Every team has a Monday morning thread: stuck payouts, failed captures, someone manually kicking off a cleanup job. We normalize these as “just how distributed systems work.” But each workaround — the retry wrappers, the runbooks, the DLQ consumers — is a sunk cost that makes the next “not yet” easier to say. This talk walks through the warning signs that your choreographed system has outgrown its architecture, why teams consistently recognize the need for orchestration too late, and what it actually costs to wait.