I'm a full time consultant, based out of my home office in Houston, Texas, United States. Even though I'm in the United States, I generally am fully available for communication during your business hours (I'm commonly online through Australian 6:00PM EST)
I've been a member of Freelancer.com since 2001.
In the past several years, scraping tools have been my bread and butter. I've written scrapers in C#, ColdFusion, JavaScript/node.js, and Ruby/Rails. I've leverage several different libraries: Selenium, straight HTTP, iMacros, Mechanize, and more. The primary project I've worked on involved scraping tens of millions of package shipments, estimates, and tracking, all while keeping up with the changes made to those websites. These scraping efforts involved not only grabbing data, but also downloading files (very difficult, and not something that most typical scraping technologies allow for).
As for your project, as you've described it, it sounds like we can use Mechanize. If necessary, we could use Selenium in a cluster. Reducing duplication shouldn't be an issue; I assume the scraper can run on Rails as well? I'm making some assumptions about your hosting setup; perhaps we could discuss further.