Concurrency in Practice - A Job Claiming System That Works

Concurrency issues don’t always show up during development—they usually surface when multiple users interact with your system simultaneously. For small-scale applications, this might not even be a concern. But if you’re a developer curious about how to handle concurrency the right way, this post is for you.

For the purpose of this blog, let’s consider a business use case: a job posting platform for freelance recruiters.

Companies post jobs on the platform, and recruiters can claim the jobs they want to work on. However, to avoid overwhelming companies with too many applications, a single job can only be claimed by a limited number of recruiters—say, four. This means we need to enforce a concurrency-safe mechanism to ensure that no more than the allowed number of claims are made per job.

Now, some of you might think: “That sounds simple—we just need to query the number of claims for a job, and if it’s greater than or equal to 4, return an error, right?”

And if I ask you about the code would it be like this?

count := db.Query(`SELECT COUNT(*) FROM job_claims WHERE job_id = ?`)
if count >= 4 {
    return error("Job fully claimed")
}
// proceed to insert claim

If so then you’re almost right—but not completely.

The problem with this approach lies in how web servers handle requests and how we think they do.

As developers, we often imagine our logic runs sequentially: a request comes in, it checks the count, inserts the claim, and we're done. But in reality, multiple requests can hit the server at the same time, and each of them can execute that same SELECT COUNT(*) query before any of them inserts their claim.

This means two or more recruiters could read the same count (say, 3), believe the job is still available, and go on to insert their own claim—resulting in more than four claims being stored. This is a classic race condition.

Before we test this out, let’s set up a basic project. For this demo, I’ll be using Golang and PostgreSQL.

Here’s what the folder structure looks like:

|- db/
   |- db.go
|- handlers/
   |- jobs.go
|-.env
|- main.go
|- test.go

Now let's break down what each file will do:

db/db.go : Handles postgresql connection setup.
handlers/jobs.go: Contains the handler/business logic for claiming the job.
.env: Stores the secrets which you dont want to expose in the code.
main.go: The entry file, which starts the http server and sets up routes.
test.go: Simulates multiple concurrent recruiters trying to claim a job.

We also need to define the database schema and relationships.
Let’s start with the basic tables required for this system:

companies: Stores information about all the companies registered on the platform.
jobs: Contains job postings created by companies.
recruiters: Holds the list of all recruiters who have signed up.
job_claims: Records when a recruiter claims a job, forming a many-to-many relationship between recruiters and jobs.

Here’s a quick sql query for setting up the tables companies table

CREATE TABLE public.companies (
  id BIGINT GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
  name TEXT NOT NULL
);

jobs table

CREATE TABLE public.jobs (
  id BIGINT GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
  role TEXT,
  company_id BIGINT,
  CONSTRAINT jobs_company_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (company_id) REFERENCES companies (id)
);

recruiter table

CREATE TABLE public.recruiter (
  id BIGINT GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
  name TEXT
);

job_claims table

CREATE TABLE public.job_claims (
  id BIGINT GENERATED BY DEFAULT AS IDENTITY PRIMARY KEY,
  created_at TIMESTAMPTZ DEFAULT now(),
  job_id BIGINT NOT NULL,
  recruiter_id BIGINT NOT NULL,
  CONSTRAINT job_claims_job_id_recruiter_id_key UNIQUE (job_id, recruiter_id),
  CONSTRAINT job_claims_job_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (job_id) REFERENCES jobs (id),
  CONSTRAINT job_claims_recruiter_id_fkey FOREIGN KEY (recruiter_id) REFERENCES recruiter (id)
);

Now since the setup is done let's move a head with implementation:

Let’s now implement the logic where we simply check how many claims a job already has, and only proceed if it’s less than 4.

This is how our handler/jobs.go will look like

func ClaimJob(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
    jobId := r.URL.Query().Get("jobId")
    recruiterId := r.URL.Query().Get("recruiterId")

    if jobId == "" || recruiterId == "" {
        http.Error(w, "Missing jobId or recruiterId", http.StatusBadRequest)
        return
    }

    // Count how many claims exist for this job
    var count int
    err := db.DB.QueryRow(`SELECT COUNT(*) FROM job_claims WHERE job_id = $1`, jobId).Scan(&count)
    if err != nil {
        http.Error(w, "Could not fetch claim count", http.StatusInternalServerError)
        return
    }

    if count >= 4 {
        http.Error(w, "Job fully claimed", http.StatusForbidden)
        return
    }

    // Insert the claim
    _, err = db.DB.Exec(`INSERT INTO job_claims (job_id, recruiter_id) VALUES ($1, $2)`, jobId, recruiterId)
    if err != nil {
        http.Error(w, "Failed to claim the job", http.StatusInternalServerError)
        return
    }

    json.NewEncoder(w).Encode(map[string]string{
        "message": "Job claimed successfully",
    })
}

And to test this out we have a test.go file. Note: This file would remain the same during entire processes

func main() {
    var wg sync.WaitGroup

    for i := 1; i <= 5; i++ {
        wg.Add(1)
        go func(rid int) {
            defer wg.Done()
            url := fmt.Sprintf("http://localhost:3000/claim-job?jobId=1&recruiterId=%d", rid)
            resp, err := http.Get(url)
            if err != nil {
                fmt.Printf("Recruiter %d error: %v\n", rid, err)
                return
            }
            defer resp.Body.Close()
            fmt.Printf("Recruiter %d: %s\n", rid, resp.Status)
        }(i)
    }

    wg.Wait()
}

If you run this test, you will get something like this

Recruiter 4: 200 OK
Recruiter 1: 200 OK
Recruiter 2: 200 OK
Recruiter 5: 200 OK
Recruiter 3: 200 OK

Note: This can be in any order since we are running it concurrently.

If you notice the output you will be able to see there are a total of 5 claims rather than just 4.

So what went wrong? Each request checked the count before inserting, but none of them had visibility into the others that were happening at the same time.

At this point, you might be thinking:
“Why not just wrap the whole thing in a transaction so that it's atomic?”

Let's try that out too. The updated section of handler/jobs.go would look like this

tx, err := db.DB.Begin()
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Could not start transaction", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}
defer tx.Rollback()

var count int
err = tx.QueryRow(`SELECT COUNT(*) FROM job_claims WHERE job_id = $1`, jobId).Scan(&count)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Could not fetch claim count", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

if count >= 4 {
    http.Error(w, "Job fully claimed", http.StatusForbidden)
    return
}

_, err = tx.Exec(`INSERT INTO job_claims (job_id, recruiter_id) VALUES ($1, $2)`, jobId, recruiterId)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Failed to claim the job", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

err = tx.Commit()
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Failed to commit transaction", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

This feels like this would solve the problem. To check this out let's try running the test.go again and we would get something like this

Recruiter 3: 200 OK
Recruiter 4: 200 OK
Recruiter 2: 200 OK
Recruiter 5: 200 OK
Recruiter 1: 200 OK

Unfortunately, this too doesn’t seem to help.

If you ask why, here's the reason: Even though the request is running a transaction, there is no locking happening. Each transaction still sees the same initial count before others have committed their transaction.

Transactions can only isolates their own change. Without explicitly locking in rows. So multiple transactions can read the same state and make decision based on that, leading to same race condition.

So now what would be the fix? The solution to this problem is to lock the job row that recruiters are trying to claim. This ensures that only one transaction can access and modify the relevant data at a time.

In postgres we have a command "SELECT FOR UPDATE" In our case it will be something like this

SELECT * FROM jobs WHERE id = $1 FOR UPDATE;

What does it do?

It locks on to the corresponding job.
Other transactions which tries to access the same row for update, will be blocked until the lock is released.

Let's update the handler logic

tx, err := db.DB.Begin()
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Could not start transaction", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}
defer tx.Rollback()

// Lock the job row
_, err = tx.Exec(`SELECT * FROM jobs WHERE id = $1 FOR UPDATE`, jobId)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Failed to lock job", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

// Check if this recruiter already claimed the job
var exists bool
err = tx.QueryRow(`SELECT EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM job_claims WHERE job_id = $1 AND recruiter_id = $2)`, jobId, recruiterId).Scan(&exists)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Could not check claim status", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

if exists {
    http.Error(w, "Recruiter already claimed this job", http.StatusConflict)
    return
}

// Count existing claims
var count int
err = tx.QueryRow(`SELECT COUNT(*) FROM job_claims WHERE job_id = $1`, jobId).Scan(&count)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Could not fetch claim count", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

if count >= 4 {
    http.Error(w, "Job fully claimed", http.StatusForbidden)
    return
}

// Insert the claim
_, err = tx.Exec(`INSERT INTO job_claims (job_id, recruiter_id) VALUES ($1, $2)`, jobId, recruiterId)
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Failed to claim job", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

err = tx.Commit()
if err != nil {
    http.Error(w, "Failed to commit transaction", http.StatusInternalServerError)
    return
}

Now when you run the test.go you will notice something like this

Recruiter 3: 200 OK
Recruiter 5: 200 OK
Recruiter 2: 200 OK
Recruiter 4: 200 OK
Recruiter 1: 403 Forbidden

As you can see only 4 claims are successful, the 5th one fails. This solves the race condition.

Now there might be some confusion that I would like to clear You might notice that we're locking a row in the jobs table, but performing operations on the job_claims table. This is intentional and highlights an important concept in database locking:

When managing concurrency, you need to lock the "decision-making resource," not just the tables being modified. In our case:

The job itself (in the jobs table) is the logical resource we're contending for
The claims (in the job_claims table) are just the implementation detail of how we track that resource allocation

By locking the job row, we ensure that all decisions about whether a particular job can accept more claims are serialised—meaning they happen one after another, not simultaneously. This prevents the race condition where multiple transactions might all see "3 claims" at the same time and all decide they can proceed.

Another approach would be to create a separate "job_claims_count" table that tracks the current count per job, and lock rows in that table instead. This would achieve the same goal while potentially reducing lock contention on the main jobs table.

For checking the implementation code check out github

Concurrency in Practice - A Job Claiming System That Works

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