https://company-engineering.pages.dev/tags/operations/Recent content in Operations on Company EngineeringHugoenFri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://company-engineering.pages.dev/posts/what-we-learned-from-running-background-workers-in-production/Fri, 05 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://company-engineering.pages.dev/posts/what-we-learned-from-running-background-workers-in-production/<p>Background workers are where a lot of our most important work happens — sending notifications, generating exports, syncing data, billing. They&rsquo;re also where the most surprising production incidents start. Here&rsquo;s what running them at scale has taught us.</p> <h2 id="jobs-are-not-functions">Jobs are not functions</h2> <p>A function call either returns or throws. A background job can also be retried, duplicated, delayed for hours, killed mid-execution, or run on code that has since been deployed over. Designing jobs means designing for all of those states, not just success and failure.</p>