DBA Intern
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Key skills for this role
About the Role
Tabby is seeking a DBA Intern to join the Database Engineers group within Infrastructure, working on high-load, security-critical systems. Interns will work on real production tasks including query performance tuning, schema review, backup and recovery, replication operations, and observability.
Key Skills for This Role
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
- Help operate data migration tooling
- 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
- Participate in on call shadowing alongside senior engineers
Requirements
- 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, normalization, primary and foreign keys
- Conceptual understanding of how a query planner works and how to read an execution plan
- 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
- Open to constructive feedback
- English sufficient for documentation and team communication
- Saudi nationals only
Full Job Posting
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.
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.
- The internship is designed for strong early career engineers who want to grow as database practitioners.
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
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
- 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
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 — 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.
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
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