Engineering
Designing for reliable webhook delivery
Sarah ParkJanuary 8, 20258 min read
Illustrative demo content; replace the delivery-rate and volume figures with numbers you can substantiate before publishing.
Reliable webhook delivery is one of the hardest problems in distributed systems. Here's the architecture we've iterated on — [CUSTOMISE: your delivery-rate claim] across [CUSTOMISE: your event volume].
The retry architecture
Our retry engine uses an exponential back-off strategy with jitter, starting at 5 seconds and maxing out at 24 hours. Each attempt is recorded in an append-only log so customers can inspect every delivery attempt.
Dead letter queues
When all retries are exhausted, events are moved to a dead letter queue. Customers can inspect, replay, or bulk-retry failed events directly from the dashboard — no support ticket required.