Speaker kit
Short bio
Simona Oancea has spent over a decade building backend systems where failure is expensive. Gaming platforms. Financial infrastructure. The kind of software where architecture isn't an academic exercise, it's the thing that wakes you up at night.
Most teams treat architecture as something you get right at the start and then defend. She thinks the opposite: that the mark of a well-built system is how gracefully it lets you change your mind.
Long bio
Simona Oancea has spent a decade building backend systems in the parts of the industry where being wrong is expensive — banking, payments, and large-scale gaming. She's now at Deutsche Bank, leading the migration of a deal management system in investment banking.
The lesson she's drawn from all of them is this: it isn't the size of an architecture decision that hurts you. It's how reversible it is. The famous ones — the framework debates, the database choices — usually get the scrutiny. What does the damage is the choice you made on a Tuesday afternoon and didn't realize was architecture until three years later, when it was already load-bearing.
Most teams get this wrong because they treat architecture as something you get right at the start and then defend. She thinks the opposite — the mark of a well-built system is how gracefully it lets you change your mind. The decisions that matter most are the ones you can undo.
Facts
- Based in Bucharest, Romania
- Speaks Romanian and English
- Talks about software architecture, large-scale distributed systems, backend engineering, enterprise Java, and agentic engineering
- Booking: email
- Speaker profile on Sessionize