Background jobs with Sidekiq and reliable queues

Moving slow operations to background jobs keeps API response times fast and improves perceived performance. Sidekiq with Redis provides a robust, production-proven job queue that handles millions of jobs per day. I organize workers into separate queues by priority (critical, default, low) and configure concurrency per queue to prevent low-priority bulk operations from starving urgent tasks. Each worker includes retry logic with exponential backoff, and I use sidekiq-unique-jobs to prevent duplicate processing when job parameters are identical. The key discipline is making workers idempotent—if a job runs twice due to at-least-once delivery semantics, it should produce the same result. I also instrument job execution time to identify slow workers that need optimization.