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About the DBA Internship at Tabby

Tabby is a fintech company that develops financial products used by millions of users across the GCC. The company operates high-load, security-critical systems with stringent regulatory requirements. This paid internship, located in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, is designed for early-career engineers with 0-1 years of experience aiming for professional growth in database engineering within a regulated fintech environment.

Role Overview

The Database Engineers (DBA) group, part of Tabby's Infrastructure team, is responsible for ensuring the reliability, performance, and recoverability of transactional and analytical databases across payment flows, risk pipelines, marketplace services, and the data platform. This is a demanding engineering role with real responsibility, where interns are embedded within the DBA group. Interns work on production tasks under senior review and are expected to meet engineering standards from day one. The core stack is built around PostgreSQL, alongside analytical and distributed databases.

Key Responsibilities

Interns will engage in real production tasks under senior review, including:

• Investigating slow queries on PostgreSQL, which involves reading execution plans, analyzing query statistics, proposing index changes or query rewrites, and validating impact on staging environments.
• Reviewing DDL/DML change requests from product teams, considering lock implications, backfill safety, rollout strategy, and rollback plans.
• Assisting in maintaining backup and point-in-time-recovery procedures, and participating in restore drills.
• Contributing to replication operations, including streaming replicas, promotion runbooks, replica lag investigations, and connection pool tuning.
• Supporting live database migrations and cross-cluster cutovers through pre-cutover validation, monitoring during cutover, and post-cutover checks.
• Helping to operate data-migration tooling, reviewing deployments, managing migration batches under senior approval, and monitoring migration metrics.
• Triaging capacity and resource issues, such as bloat, autovacuum tuning, partition maintenance, and IOPS planning.
• Building and refining observability tools, including dashboards, monitors, query statistics, wait-event analysis, and replication lag tracking.
• Maintaining operational runbooks, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), and post-incident write-ups.
• Supporting secure data handling reviews in collaboration with security and risk teams, focusing on PII fields, encryption at rest, and role-based access.
• Participating in on-call shadowing alongside senior engineers.

Eligibility and Program Details

This is a paid internship program, self-funded by Tabby, with full integration into the Database Engineers group. The program is open to Saudi nationals (Saudi passport required), including both current students and fresh graduates. A full-time level of engagement is expected throughout the internship, requiring interns to contribute at a full working-day pace. While students may occasionally require flexibility for classes or exams, which can be aligned with the mentor in advance, overall performance, ownership, and context involvement are expected at a full-time level.

Work Environment and Career Path

The engineering team at Tabby is distributed across multiple countries. While the location offers some flexibility, an office-first approach in Riyadh is preferred where possible. There is a clear path to a junior Database Engineer role based on performance and successful completion of the internship.

Application Information

Candidates who meet the eligibility criteria and are interested in this Database Administrator internship are encouraged to apply.