bullmq-specialist

BullMQ Specialist is a knowledge and code-pattern skill for building reliable Redis-backed job queues and background processing in Node.js and TypeScript applications with BullMQ. It solves the problem teams hit when they wire up a queue naively: jobs that run twice without idempotency, retry storms with no backoff, orphaned jobs on deploy, and failures with nowhere to land. The skill encodes production principles up front, such as treating jobs as fire-and-forget from the producer, setting explicit job options, keeping payloads small by passing IDs rather than objects, using dead-letter queues, and handling SIGTERM for graceful shutdown.

It catalogs capabilities (queues, scheduling, delayed and repeatable jobs, priorities, rate limiting, events, worker patterns, flow producers, dependencies) and maps adjacent concerns to other specialists (Redis infrastructure, serverless queues, workflow orchestration, event sourcing, email delivery). It lists core tooling (bullmq, ioredis), hosting options (Upstash, Redis Cloud, ElastiCache, Railway), and monitoring tools (Bull Board, Arena, BullMQ Pro). The bulk of the content is annotated, copy-ready patterns: a production queue and worker setup with attempts, exponential backoff, retention, concurrency, and a rate limiter; delayed and cron-scheduled repeatable jobs; FlowProducer parent-child job flows; graceful shutdown; and a Bull Board monitoring dashboard. It closes with a set of validation checks (missing maxRetriesPerRequest, no stalled/failed handlers, no graceful shutdown, awaited queue.add in request handlers, oversized payloads, retries without backoff, repeatable jobs without an explicit timezone) each with a severity and message.

The target users are Node.js and TypeScript backend developers implementing or reviewing background-processing systems. It is advisory reference material and example code, with no execution, network calls, or credential handling of its own.