DBA Intern

Tabby

Saudi Arabia

Posted July 07, 2026

Internship

Job Overview

About the company

Tabby builds financial products used by millions of users across the GCC. We work on high-load, security-critical systems with strict regulatory requirements. The Database Engineers group (DBA) is part of Infrastructure and keeps Tabby's transactional and analytical databases reliable, performant, and recoverable across payment flows, risk pipelines, marketplace services, and the data platform.

This internship is not educational by default. It is an engineering role with real responsibility.

Context

Database Engineers at Tabby own the operational health of our primary data stores. The core stack is built around PostgreSQL, alongside analytical and distributed databases. The team works on performance tuning, schema and migration review, replication and high availability, backup and recovery, capacity planning, observability, and incident response, and collaborates closely with product, platform, risk, and data engineering teams.

The internship is designed for strong early-career engineers who want to grow as database practitioners. Interns are embedded with the DBA group, work on real production tasks under senior review, and are expected to meet engineering standards from day one.

Key Responsibilities

What you will do

This is not a helper or shadow-only role. Interns work on real production tasks under senior review.

Investigate slow queries on PostgreSQL — read execution plans, analyze query statistics, propose index changes or query rewrites, and validate impact on staging
Review DDL/DML change requests from product teams: lock implications, backfill safety, rollout strategy, rollback plan
Help maintain backup and point-in-time-recovery procedures; participate in restore drills
Contribute to replication operations — streaming replicas, promotion runbooks, replica lag investigations, connection pool tuning
Support live database migrations and cross-cluster cutovers: pre-cutover validation, monitoring during cutover, post-cutover checks
Help operate data-migration tooling: review deployments, manage migration batches under senior approval, monitor migration metrics
Triage capacity and resource issues: bloat, autovacuum tuning, partition maintenance, IOPS planning
Build and refine observability — dashboards, monitors, query stats, wait-event analysis, replication lag tracking
Maintain operational runbooks, SOPs, and post-incident write-ups
Support secure data handling reviews together with security and risk teams (PII fields, encryption at rest, role-based access)
Participate in on-call shadowing alongside senior engineers

Skills, Knowledge & Expertise

Required

Working knowledge of at least one programming or scripting language (Python, Go, or Bash)
Solid SQL skills: joins, aggregation, window functions, CTEs, subqueries
Understanding of relational database fundamentals: ACID, transaction isolation levels, indexes (B-tree, hash), normalization, primary and foreign keys
Conceptual understanding of how a query planner works and how to read an execution plan (EXPLAIN, EXPLAIN ANALYZE)
Familiarity with Linux command line and POSIX-like environments
Understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, and basic networking
Ability to read, understand, and modify existing codebases
Experience with Git and standard development workflows
Strong ethical mindset and discretion — production data is sensitive by default, non-disclosure outside the team is non-negotiable
Open to constructive feedback
English sufficient for documentation and team communication

Strong plus

Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL — even from personal projects, university coursework, or open-source contributions
Exposure to other data stores: ClickHouse, CockroachDB, Redis, MongoDB, Kafka
Understanding of replication concepts (logical vs physical, streaming, WAL, replication slots)
Familiarity with CDC patterns (Debezium, Flink, logical replication consumers)
Familiarity with connection poolers (PgBouncer or similar)
Familiarity with cloud-managed databases on GCP (CloudSQL, AlloyDB) or AWS (RDS, Aurora)
Awareness of Kubernetes-native database operators (CloudNativePG, Zalando Postgres Operator)
Exposure to Infrastructure-as-Code tooling (Terraform)
Familiarity with an observability stack (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or similar)
Understanding of partitioning strategies and large-table maintenance
Awareness of regulatory frameworks relevant to fintech (PCI DSS, ISO 27001, SAMA)
Interest in database internals — storage layout, MVCC, vacuum, autovacuum tuning
CTFs, database challenges, or open-source contributions to database tooling

What we do not expect

Prior professional DBA experience
Mastery of all listed databases and tooling
Ability to run independent performance audits on production systems
Deep internals expertise (planner internals, custom extensions, replication protocol details)
Existing certifications (PostgreSQL Associate / Professional, GCP Database Engineer, AWS Database Specialty) — welcome but not required

Eligibility

Saudi nationals only
Self-funded internship by Tabby
We welcome both current students and fresh grads
We expect a full-time level of engagement throughout the internship. The program is not part-time: interns should be ready to contribute at a full working-day pace. We understand that students may occasionally need flexibility for classes or exams, which can be aligned with the mentor in advance, but overall performance, ownership, and context involvement are expected at a full-time level.