I believe the flavor of the year is Gearman by Brad Fitzpatrick. I think that it should have plenty of power to handle what your looking for. There is also TheSchwartz (also by Brad Fitzpatrick) that may be more reliable but higher latency. If you combine Gearman with TheSwartz you should be able to do just about anything with job queuing.
update - s/TheSwartz/TheSchwartz/ (thanks to clinton)
my @a=qw(random brilliant braindead); print $a[rand(@a)];