Big Data Architect to Help Guide a Team Building a Social Network

Project Description

I am business guy with a working knowledge of technology in need of good guidance. I am working with a skilled development team of about 8-15 people at any given time. All of them are located in New Delhi, India (part of a 400+ person company).

We are building a social network with all the typical data sets gathered (location, media, chat, streaming, analytics, etc.) and open APIs. I would like to find someone who has proven experience in architecting related systems and can suggest the right technology stack and architecture for us. We have decided to take the open source route. We are a startup self-funded and want to make sure we get this initial setup right so that we can quickly scale while maintaining performance. We think we have the right idea, but I want to take the guessing out of the effort and just want to get a third party opinion from someone else who has experience in massively parallel grid computing based on the third platform (which is all new to me). I think we only need this person for short stints of guidance and would like to build a long term relationship with this individual.

We want some big data recommendations around technologies like Casandra, Hadoop, Hbase, Rabbit mq, graph dbs., etc. (not to mention any particular). We would like you tell us why to use them from your applied expertise with these or similar technologies.  As well as look at the database structure for any rigidness, look at the coding for any possible recommendations - like there should be a latitude and longitude on all events and facts (geo special awareness aka geo fencing the data) for both security detection and to collect valuable location data (which is currently not present in the db.). Provide some guidance on the idea of making sure the architecture considers massively parallel grid computing, in memory data grids etc. Keep in mind that the social network has all the traditional things that one would come to expect as well as analytics with both structured and unstructured data sets.

Compensation is based on skill, I figure anywhere from $75-$150/h. Initially we might only need 10 or so hours. An NDA is required to be signed.