A distributed job-processing environment including a server, or servers, capable of receiving and processing user-submitted job queries for data sets on backend storage servers. The server identifies computational tasks to be completed on the job as well as a time frame to complete some of the computational tasks. Computational tasks may include, without limitation, preprocessing, parsing, importing, verifying dependencies, retrieving relevant metadata, checking syntax and semantics, optimizing, compiling, and running. The server performs the computational tasks, and once the time frame expires, a message is transmitted to the user indicating which tasks have been completed. The rest of the computational tasks are subsequently performed, and eventually, job results are transmitted to the user.