What we're Building

A background job system built on PostgresSQL - no BullMQ, no SQS, no Redis. Jobs are durable (survive crashes), contention-free (multiple workers, no double-processing), and enqueued atomically with business data.

Three moving parts:

1. The API server - accepts business operations and enqueues jobs inside the same DB transaction (the outbox pattern). Exposes as admin HTTP API.
2. The Worker Engine - polls the jobs table, claims jobs with SELECT FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, runs handlers, manages retries and failures.
3. The PostgresSQL Database - the single source of truth. No external queue broker. The DB is the queue.

Build Order(Session 1-7)

So you know where we're headed:

Session 1 -> DB schema + migrations + pg client setup