DBA📣 Job Ad

About the DBA Internship at Tabby

Tabby develops financial products utilized by millions of users across the GCC region. This DBA Intern role is an engineering position within the Database Engineers group, which is part of the Infrastructure team. The internship is designed to provide real responsibility, focusing on the operational health of Tabby's primary data stores. While the role is office-first in Riyadh where possible, location flexibility is offered for Saudi nationals.

The Database Engineering Group

The Database Engineers group is responsible for maintaining the reliability, performance, and recoverability of Tabby's transactional and analytical databases across various critical systems, including payment flows, risk pipelines, marketplace services, and the data platform. The team's core stack is built around PostgreSQL, alongside other analytical and distributed databases. Key areas of focus include performance tuning, schema and migration review, replication and high availability, backup and recovery, capacity planning, observability, and incident response. The team works closely with product, platform, risk, and data engineering teams.

Internship Responsibilities

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

Eligibility and Program Structure

This paid internship is open exclusively to Saudi nationals (Saudi passport required), including both current students and fresh graduates. It is a self-funded program by Tabby. Candidates must be prepared for a full-time level of engagement, contributing at a full working-day pace, as the program is not part-time. Interns will be fully integrated into the Database Engineers group within Infrastructure, working on production tasks under senior review. The program offers a clear path to a junior Database Engineer role based on performance and is designed for fast professional growth in database engineering within a regulated fintech environment.

Candidate Requirements

Candidates for this internship should demonstrate the following:

• A strong ethical mindset and discretion, acknowledging the sensitive nature of production data.
• Openness to receiving and acting upon constructive feedback.
• A genuine interest in database internals, including storage layout, MVCC, vacuum, and autovacuum tuning.
• Participation in Capture The Flag (CTF) events, database challenges, or contributions to open-source database tooling.