Your @EventListener Fires Before the Transaction Commits⚙️

Your domain event fires. Your notification service queries the DB for the entity that just got saved. It finds nothing. You add a log line. It starts working. You remove the log. It breaks again. That's not a race condition. That's @EventListener . What's actually happening Spring's @EventListener fires synchronously, inside the calling thread, before the transaction commits. The DB row exists in Hibernate's session — but it hasn't been flushed and committed yet. Other connections, including the one your listener opens when it calls findById , can't see it. The log statement "fixes" it because the delay gives Hibernate time to flush. Remove the log, the flush doesn't happen in time, and you're back to an empty Optional . Here's the broken setup: @Component public class OrderEventListener { @EventListener // fires MID-TRANSACTION, before commit public void onOrderCreated ( OrderCreatedEvent event ) { // Transaction not committed yet. // Other DB connections see nothing. Order order = orderRepository . findById ( event . getOrderId ()) . orElseThrow (); // ← throws here, row doesn't exist yet notificationService . notifyCustomer ( order ); } } The obvious fix and what it costs you Spring ships @TransactionalEventListener for exactly this. Set phase = TransactionPhase.AFTER_COMMIT and the listener fires after the transaction commits. The row is visible. findById returns the order. Problem solved. @Component public class OrderEventListener { @TransactionalEventListener ( phase = TransactionPhase . AFTER_COMMIT ) public void onOrderCreated ( OrderCreatedEvent event ) { // Transaction committed. All connections see the row. Order order = orderRepository . findById ( event . getOrderId ()) . orElseThrow (); // ← works fine notificationService . notifyCustomer ( order ); } } But the trade-off is real. Your listener is now decoupled from the transaction. If the listener fails — notification service is down, the email throws, the external API times out — the transaction alrea