Sidekiq at Gusto: The Parts Where People's Jaw Drops
Phillip Campbell • Boulder, CO • Talk

Date: October 06, 2025
Published: not published
Announced: unknown

At Gusto, we run over 100 million Sidekiq jobs a day across a complex Rails ecosystem and every time I explain how it works, someone's jaw drops. This talk is a tour through the most surprising, "wait, seriously?" parts of how we scale background jobs to support 600+ engineers and millions of users.

We'll cover real patterns we've built around queue SLAs, autoscaling, Redis usage, job repair, and how we package Sidekiq infrastructure into gems used across all our apps. Along the way, I'll share the gotchas, hacks, and lessons learned from scaling async workloads way past the comfort zone.

Whether you're running Sidekiq at scale or just curious how far you can push it, this talk will leave you laughing, wincing, and maybe rethinking your retry settings.

Rocky Mountain Ruby 2025