Back to All Blogs1 min read6 Sept 2026
Backend Engineering Essentials · Part 6 of 7
Background Jobs: Retries, Backoff and Failure Handling
“Design asynchronous workers that survive transient failures without duplicating work.”
Background Jobs
Background jobs are ideal for work that does not need to complete before the user receives a response.
Examples include transactional emails, video processing, imports, exports and analytics.
Job Lifecycle
queued
↓
processing
↓
completedor:
processing
↓
failed
↓
retryingRetry With Backoff
Attempt 1 → immediately
Attempt 2 → 10 seconds
Attempt 3 → 30 seconds
Attempt 4 → 2 minutes
Attempt 5 → 10 minutesIdempotent Workers
if (await hasProcessed(job.id)) {
return;
}
await execute(job);
await markProcessed(job.id);Warning
Never assume a background task runs exactly once unless every side effect supports that guarantee.
Monitor queue depth, oldest job age, attempts and failure rate.
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