--- title: Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq... description: Evil Martians recounts a five-month engagement embedding engineer Andrey Novikov inside Gusto's platform team to work on Sidekiq infrastructure powering... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog | daily.dev og:description: Evil Martians recounts a five-month engagement embedding engineer Andrey Novikov inside Gusto's platform team to work on Sidekiq infrastructure powering... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/E2ddm8ahV.png og:image:alt: Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog **[Martian Chronicles](https://daily.dev/sources/evilmartians)** · 10 min read · 2 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary Evil Martians recounts a five-month engagement embedding engineer Andrey Novikov inside Gusto's platform team to work on Sidekiq infrastructure powering payroll for 500,000+ businesses. Gusto runs roughly 170-270 million Sidekiq jobs daily across ~1,000 workers on a single Redis instance, bottlenecked by its primary database rather than Redis or worker CPU. The piece covers why a strong engineering org still hires specialists for a hard, high-stakes layer, details work like Sidekiq version upgrades, enabling strict arguments, open-sourcing a RuboCop rule (Sidekiq/PerformAsyncStub), and reflects on Gusto's Rails monolith practices (packs, code ownership, AI-assisted onboarding and review) plus the growing load AI features place on background job queues. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### How many Sidekiq jobs does a large-scale Rails application like Gusto's process per day? Gusto processes around 170 million Sidekiq jobs a day, peaking near 270 million, running across roughly a thousand workers on a single Redis instance. The bottleneck isn't Redis memory or worker CPU but the primary database, which is single-threaded and already running at the fastest clock speed AWS offers. _Teams scaling background job pipelines can follow real-world Sidekiq scaling stories like this on daily.dev._ ### What causes Sidekiq queue latency problems in multi-tenant applications? Queue latency in multi-tenant Sidekiq setups often comes from a 'noisy neighbor' problem, where one tenant's heavy job volume monopolizes shared queues while other tenants silently wait. Gusto addressed this with an auto-rerouter that moves jobs eating too much of a queue, though the mechanism is considered user-unfriendly and is being reconsidered. _daily.dev helps engineers tracking multi-tenant queue fairness patterns stay current on Sidekiq scaling techniques._ ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@pboling** · 0 upvotes > Evil Martians has some top brains! ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Fair by design: orchestrating background jobs in Ruby—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog](https://daily.dev/posts/fair-by-design-orchestrating-background-jobs-in-ruby-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blog-piyszlqky) · Martian Chronicles · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Why devtools startups hire Evil Martians—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog](https://daily.dev/posts/why-devtools-startups-hire-evil-martians-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blog-hrnipwxmj) · Martian Chronicles · 1 upvotes · 1 comments - [2 Martians, greenfield to MVP in 4 weeks: agentic coding on Rails—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog](https://daily.dev/posts/2-martians-greenfield-to-mvp-in-4-weeks-agentic-coding-on-rails-martian-chronicles-evil-martians--jfk5nweey) · Martian Chronicles · 5 upvotes · 1 comments - [Worth the Squeeze](https://daily.dev/posts/worth-the-squeeze-rbj2l7p7o) · Gusto Engineering · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#rails](https://daily.dev/tags/rails), [#redis](https://daily.dev/tags/redis) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv"},"datePublished":"2026-09-02T17:58:38.458Z","dateModified":"2026-09-02T19:34:22.266Z","description":"Evil Martians recounts a five-month engagement embedding engineer Andrey Novikov inside Gusto's platform team to work on Sidekiq infrastructure powering...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5dbfb26e31cf2102e94b834ccca79797?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/5dbfb26e31cf2102e94b834ccca79797?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Martian Chronicles","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Martian Chronicles","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/6334c9de96a7414ebbf4b7667ba572c5","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/evilmartians"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":2},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"rails,redis","timeRequired":"PT10M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Martian Chronicles","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/evilmartians"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Why Gusto hired Evil Martians for Sidekiq infrastructure—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"Evil Martians has some top brains!","datePublished":"2026-09-07T04:15:43.972Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/E2ddm8ahV#c-ysmRA8Zka","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"Peter Boling","url":"https://daily.dev/pboling","image":"https://avatars.githubusercontent.com/u/19505?v=4"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/why-gusto-hired-evil-martians-for-sidekiq-infrastructure-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-blo-e2ddm8ahv#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"How many Sidekiq jobs does a large-scale Rails application like Gusto's process per day?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Gusto processes around 170 million Sidekiq jobs a day, peaking near 270 million, running across roughly a thousand workers on a single Redis instance. 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