Hello,
As a developer with over 9 years of professional front-end (HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Flash/ActionScript) and back-end (PHP, .NET, Java, Rails, Python) experience, I believe I can meet your needs. I am based in Washington, DC and currently strictly freelance.
This is a very rough proof-of-concept that I created for another project: Quandl is a data provider which has multiple databases for stock information. I've used it to build a WordPress plugin that uses 3 shortcodes to display information for a particular market, a certain stock or an animated ticker that shows the most recently available data for any number of stocks.
I am curious about how you want the WordPress admin UI to work: do you want users to have a drag-and-drop interfaces for customizing thumbnails or would regular form controls work? Also, are there design considerations for displaying the rows of thumbnails (e.g. responsiveness) or are you only concerned about the size of the thumbnails?
Let me know your thoughts and whether you have questions for me as well. Thank you for your consideration!
Regards,
Edwin