Add a Dead Letter Queue

A payment-confirmation worker sometimes fails to process messages (downstream timeout). Failed messages are currently discarded permanently. Add a DLQ.

Context

A Dead Letter Queue (DLQ) receives messages that a consumer repeatedly fails to process — after N retries, the broker moves them to the DLQ instead of discarding them. This ensures no message is permanently lost to a transient failure, and the poisoned events remain available for inspection and manual or automated replay. Use a DLQ with any asynchronous consumer that can fail: payment processing, external integrations, data pipelines — every production queue should have one.

Requirements

•After N failed attempts, move the message to a Dead Letter Queue
•The main queue must keep processing other messages normally
•The DLQ holds failed messages for inspection, alerting, or manual retry

Non-Functional Requirements

•No message should be permanently lost due to a processing failure

Constraints

•Assume the main queue and worker already exist — add the DLQ path

Evaluation Criteria

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