the original poster's project also requires shared filesystem.

as for bash-ssh solution, you don't need shared FS, if you don't need intermediate results. you can use SCP to get the final result after transcoding has finished. something like:

  alias ffmpeg-over-ip='ssh myserver "ffmpeg \"\$@\" /tmp/output/"'
  alias download-results='scp myserver:/tmp/output/*.* .'

  ffmpeg-over-ip <args> && download-results

my meta point being is, before engineering something with programming language, and handrolling webservers, with auth, and workers - just try to implement your system with bash scripts.

Martin Klepmann created an entire database using just bash aliases in his book "Designing Data Intensive Applications"