Techniques disclosed herein provide an approach for assigning resource consumers to available resources. In one embodiment, components of a distributed scheduler are organized into a hierarchy, such as a tree. A placement request received at a root scheduler of the hierarchy is propagated down the hierarchy, either to all children or to randomly selected subsets of children of each scheduler in the hierarchy. Leaf schedulers in the hierarchy that receive the request each propagate back up a score indicating the amount of free resources in its corresponding resource bucket. Branch schedulers then compare scores that they receive, and each further propagate one of the received scores, such as the highest score, based on the comparison, until the root scheduler is reached. The root scheduler makes an additional comparison and returns one of the resource buckets in response to the received placement request.