DBA Intern

Tabby | تابي; Riyadh; Hybrid; SAR 20,088 - 33,480; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Paid internship

Job summary

Tabby is seeking a Database Engineering internship in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. You will join the Infrastructure group and handle real production tasks under senior review, growing as a database practitioner with PostgreSQL and related data stores.

We expect strong early-career engineers who can contribute to performance, backup, replication, and observability tasks from day one. Office-first, with flexibility for location. This paid internship offers a clear path to a junior database engineer role.

Qualifications

• 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).
• Conceptual understanding of a query planner and reading an execution plan (EXPLAIN).
• 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.
• Open to constructive feedback.
• English sufficient for documentation and team communication.

Responsibilities

• Investigate slow queries on PostgreSQL — read execution plans and propose index changes.
• Review DDL/DML change requests from product teams with lock implications and rollback plans.
• Help maintain backup and point-in-time recovery procedures; participate in restore drills.
• Contribute to replication operations — streaming replicas and lag investigations.
• Support live database migrations and cross-cluster cutovers with validation and monitoring.
• Help operate data-migration tooling and monitor migration metrics.
• Triage capacity and resource issues: bloat, autovacuum tuning, partition maintenance.
• Build and refine observability — dashboards, monitors, and query stats.
• Maintain operational runbooks, SOPs, and post-incident write-ups.
• Support secure data handling reviews with security and risk teams (PII, encryption).
• Participate in on-call shadowing with senior engineers.

Skills

Python

Go

Bash

SQL

Linux

Networking

Git

English

Tools

PostgreSQL

DBeavor

Job description

About the company

About the companyTabby 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.

Department

Infrastructure

Location

KSA

Internship Overview

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

• 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.

Format

• Paid internship
• Full integration into the Database Engineers group within Infrastructure
• Distributed engineering team across multiple countries
• Open to Saudi nationals (Saudi passport required); location flexible — candidates may be based outside KSA
• Office‑first in Riyadh where possible
• Clear path to a junior Database Engineer role based on performance

This internship is intentionally demanding and designed for candidates aiming for fast professional growth in database engineering at a regulated fintech.