Implementing retries with exponential backoff and jitter is the most appropriate design pattern for handling transient failures in a distributed system. Exponential backoff increases the delay between retries, reducing the pressure on the system, and jitter adds randomness to the delay, preventing synchronous retries from overwhelming the service at predictable intervals. Circuit Breaker differs because it stops the application from performing an operation that's likely to fail, rather than retrying the call. Retries without delay could overwhelm the downstream services, leading to cascading failures. Lastly, implementing a message queue without a retry strategy does not address transient errors in the processing of individual tasks.