Where do I go from here?
angelbob: "Hey, we need someone to develop an infrastructure for scheduling and running thousands of jobs on hunreds of different boxes and to keep the status of said jobs, etc." But that kind of makes me an architecture astronaut which, supposedly, is A Bad Thing (tm)Just doing it to do it makes you an architecture astronaut.  Finding somebody with that problem and solving it, especially in a different way, is a desirable thing.  You could either out-compete an existing solution by doing it better, or find a chunk of problem space they don't really address (or don't address well).Then you're an entrepreneur, which around here is certainly a desirable thing :-)That is to say, figure out what it's useful for and keep that in mind.