Techniques for scheduling one or more MapReduce jobs in a presence of one or more priority classes are provided. The techniques include obtaining a preferred ordering for one or more MapReduce jobs, wherein the preferred ordering comprises one or more priority classes, prioritizing the one or more priority classes subject to one or more dynamic minimum slot guarantees for each priority class, and iteratively employing a MapReduce scheduler, once per priority class, in priority class order, to optimize performance of the one or more MapReduce jobs.