Background Job Reliability Audit
For teams operating Celery, Sidekiq, Bull, River, or custom schedulers who need an independent read on why jobs stall, double-run, or vanish from metrics.
Who this is for
Engineering leads and senior developers responsible for a revenue- or compliance-critical async pipeline—billing runs, ledger postings, media transcoding, or outbound notifications. You already have monitors; you need someone to read the code and broker settings alongside the graphs.
Outcome
A written audit report with severity-ranked findings, suggested code changes, and a one-page operations checklist your on-call can follow during the next backlog spike. We do not leave you with a slide deck alone.
What we review
- Enqueue paths: payload shape, deduplication keys, and scheduling delays
- Worker execution: timeouts, heartbeats, graceful shutdown, and poison handling
- Retry and dead-letter policy: jitter, max attempts, and manual replay safety
- Concurrency: pool sizes, partition affinity, and database connection churn
- Observability: lag metrics, trace propagation through jobs, and alert thresholds
What is excluded
Greenfield broker selection, full application penetration testing, and implementation labour beyond advisory pairing. We can recommend contractors but do not staff long builds.
Provider and process
Led by SyncPavilion principal consultants with production SRE and application backgrounds. Week one: access setup, architecture interview, and log/trace sampling. Week two: deep dives, pairing fixes for quick wins, and report delivery call.
Duration and delivery
Ten business days from kickoff. Remote by default; on-site days in Gauteng can be arranged for kickoff or readout.
Preparation
Read-only repository access, staging or sanitized production metrics, and a named engineer available for two pairing blocks.
Pricing basis
Fixed fee per pipeline audited; see rates for current bands. A second pipeline on the same codebase receives a reduced follow-on quote.
Next step
Send a one-paragraph description of the pipeline and your broker. We reply with a short questionnaire and a calendar link for scoping.