Thanks for the input on this. Of course, real world usage is more complicated than my simplified example, but this feedback put me down a good path.

Our workflows can get somewhat complicated and we want to define as much of them as possible up front to centralize the domain knowledge about how the business process operates. That means I want to avoid adding jobs dynamically as much as possible, which makes scheduled_at a tougher sell though.

We also have the issue that these jobs can be used in a couple of different workflows with slightly different contexts, so we don’t want to couple them together more than necessary.

However, we can use snoozing to get a similar result. Job B takes an argument telling it how long it snooze. When the job runs, we can check if it’s snoozed before (See Oban.Pro.Engines.Smart — Oban Pro v1.5.0-rc.6). If it hasn’t snoozed yet, then we snooze it for the passed in number of seconds.

The end result is that job A completes first. This unblocks job B. B runs and immediately snoozes for the configured amount of time.