PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY as a lightweight job queue: replacing Redis for your startup's background tasks

--- title : " PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY: Your Startup's Job Queue" published : true description : " Replace Redis with PostgreSQL LISTEN/NOTIFY and SKIP LOCKED for a zero-dependency job queue handling 50K jobs/hour. Schema design, retry logic, and benchmarks inside." tags : postgresql, architecture, api, performance canonical_url : https://blog.mvpfactory.co/postgresql-listen-notify-job-queue --- ## What We Will Build Let me show you a pattern I use in every project that needs background jobs before it needs Redis. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a fully transactional job queue running on PostgreSQL alone — using `LISTEN/NOTIFY` for instant wake-ups and `SKIP LOCKED` for safe concurrent processing. No new infrastructure. No extra dependencies. Just your existing database doing more than you thought it could. We will cover the schema, the worker pattern, retry logic with exponential backoff, dead-letter handling, and real benchmarks showing 50K+ jobs/hour on modest hardware. #