Secure Employees SSH Access To Server

I'm thinking about creating a limited platform for my employees to access my hosting servers

I wish they can create certain types of directories for users, set permissions on some directories, list users accounts, etc.

but although I don't think they would want to abuse this kind of access, I not only like the Trust-No-One premisse, but I also find it not very unlikely that the computer they're using get compromised or something like that

so I'd like to get technical ideas on how to develop this system and to know if anyone is interested and would like to contribute to the code

what I've considered so far is that I should either create a special user for that which would be on all users group, or should give it "root" access... the latter seems more reasonable for me considering the implementation and compatibility between systems and control panels

but with "root" access I mean "running MY INTERFACE to the employee as root"... this interface would have limited options like "create directory for user X", "list content of user X", etc. (taking a lot of care on input validation)... and would enforce some limits to prevent abuse (for example, can't list the content of more than 10 users per hour, or something like that... and alert me)

my main doubt is how you think that should be implemented? as a special server or as a webservice? with webservice I have the advantage of being capable of using SSL in a simple way and I don't need a special client (since any browser is a client)
then that could be PHP or Perl... but running as UID 0 (I don't even know if apache allows that, or if there's a workaround like SUID)