Diana Zawadzki
Uber, Software Engineer
San Francisco, California, United States
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Diana Zawadzki is a Software Engineer on Uber’s Cadence team, focused on durable workflow orchestration, AI-native developer tooling, and reliable long-running systems. She contributes to Cadence’s open-source ecosystem and previously worked on Uber’s Java Monorepo and AI/ML Platform infrastructure teams. Diana studied Computer Science at Stanford with a focus on operating systems and distributed systems.
Area of Expertise
Secure Your Agents in 5 Minutes: Durable Execution with Cadence
AI agents are powerful, but production agent workflows are fragile: tools time out, model calls fail, workers restart, human approvals take hours, and long-running tasks can lose state halfway through execution.
Cadence Workflow is a CNCF sandbox project for durable workflow orchestration. In this 5-minute project lightning talk, we will show how Cadence helps make agentic workflows more secure, reliable, and recoverable by giving them persisted state, retries, timeouts, human checkpoints, worker failure recovery, and observable execution history.
Attendees will leave with a simple mental model for when an agent should become a durable workflow, where Cadence fits in the AI-native cloud native stack, and how to get involved with the project through docs, samples, developer tooling, and AI workflow examples.
Cadence Workflow ContribFest: Build Durable AI Agent Examples
Cadence Workflow is a CNCF sandbox project for durable workflow orchestration. This ContribFest will be a working session for improving Cadence’s AI-agent developer path: runnable examples, docs, and starter issues that show how to model long-running agentic workflows as durable workflows.
Participants will work with Cadence maintainers on concrete tasks such as validating the local quickstart, improving docs for retries/timeouts/idempotent activities, creating or polishing an AI-agent workflow sample, and identifying confusing setup or contribution steps. The session will start with a short overview of Cadence and the available issues, then split into small groups to make docs PRs, sample updates, or issue triage progress.
The project benefit is a better contributor onramp and more practical examples for developers building reliable agent workflows with Cadence.
Agents Fail. Workflows Recover. Durable Agent Orchestration with Cadence.
Uber’s AI/ML Platform Team is relying on Cadence as part of their new Agent Executor Service, facilitating durable agentic workflow orchestration at scale.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have evolved from simple text prediction to autonomous agents capable of orchestrating complex tools. However, a critical gap exists in the current ecosystem: durable orchestration. Most agent SDKs are stateless by design, making them fragile in production environments where network partitions, long-running tasks, and system failures are inevitable.
In this session, we explore a cloud-native architectural pattern to solve the “stateless agent” problem by using Cadence as a robust durability layer for agent orchestration. We will move beyond the “hello world” agent and demonstrate how to build production-ready systems that require:
- Fault tolerance: Resuming complex reasoning chains after a process crash.
- Auditability: Maintaining a permanent, replayable record of agent decisions and tool executions.
- Long-running state: Managing agents that operate over days or weeks rather than seconds.
We will provide a technical deep dive into integrating Cadence with popular frameworks like OpenAI, Google ADK, and Claude. We will also show how Cadence fits into the broader AI ecosystem, including Cadence AI Skills and AI-native coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Hermes Agent, so developers can write their first Cadence-aware agent workflow in minutes.
Attendees will walk away with a blueprint for durable agent orchestration: implementing automatic checkpointing and retries, recovering from failures instead of restarting, and ensuring their AI agents are as reliable as their microservices.
Project Lightning Talk + ContribFest + Maintainer Track: KubeCon + CloudNativeCon NA 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026 Sessionize Event Upcoming
Diana Zawadzki
Uber, Software Engineer
San Francisco, California, United States
Actions
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