Super cool to see you here.
I've also looked at ray for running data pipelines before (at much much smaller scales) for the reasons you suggest (unstructured data, mixed CPU/GPU compute).
One thing I've wanted is an incremental computation framework (i.e., salsa [1]) built on ray so that I can write jobs that transparently reuse intermediate results from an object store if their dependents haven't changed.
Do you know if anyone has thought of building something like this?