Yeah, linked servers require elevated permissions, it's one of their drawbacks. For data of significant size, ddl_admin is pretty much required on the remote side or your plans could suffer: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms175537(v=sql.105).aspx It's unavoidable perhaps.

However, I wonder if in this particular case you could instead change the owner of the jobs you're trying to remotely administer to a service account that is also used to make the linked server connection. Then maybe you can get around the "owned by another user" problem.