According to one aspect of the present disclosure, a technique for job distribution within a grid environment includes receiving jobs at a submission cluster for distribution of the jobs to one or more execution clusters where each of the execution clusters has one or more execution hosts and maintains a pending job queue. A resource capacity corresponding to each respective execution cluster is determined, and resource requirements for the jobs is determined. A length of the pending job queue indicating a quantity of pending jobs to maintain in the pending job queue for the respective execution cluster is dynamically calculated and periodically adjusted based on the resource capacity and the resource requirements of the respective execution clusters. The jobs are allocated to the respective execution clusters according to the length of the pending job queue of the respective execution clusters.