About Tabby and the DBA Internship

Tabby is seeking a Database Administrator (DBA) Intern to join its team in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. This is a paid internship designed for early-career engineers with 0-1 years of experience, offering real engineering responsibilities within a high-load, security-critical environment. Tabby develops financial products utilized by millions of users across the GCC region, operating under strict regulatory requirements.

The Database Engineering Group

The Database Engineers (DBA) group is an integral part of Tabby's Infrastructure team. This group is responsible for ensuring 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. This internship is structured as an engineering role, providing direct involvement in production tasks.

Key Responsibilities

• Investigate slow queries on PostgreSQL, including reading execution plans, analyzing query statistics, and proposing index changes or query rewrites, with validation on staging environments.
• Review DDL/DML change requests from product teams, considering lock implications, backfill safety, rollout strategies, and rollback plans.
• Assist in maintaining backup and point-in-time-recovery procedures and participate in restore drills.
• Contribute to replication operations, such as managing streaming replicas, promotion runbooks, investigating replica lag, and tuning connection pools.
• Support live database migrations and cross-cluster cutovers, including pre-cutover validation, monitoring during cutover, and post-cutover checks.
• Aid in operating data-migration tooling, reviewing deployments, managing migration batches under senior approval, and monitoring migration metrics.
• Triage capacity and resource issues, focusing on bloat, autovacuum tuning, partition maintenance, and IOPS planning.
• Build and refine observability tools, including dashboards, monitors, query statistics, 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, covering PII fields, encryption at rest, and role-based access.
• Participate in on-call shadowing alongside senior engineers.

Candidate Profile and Requirements

• Strong early-career engineer with 0-1 years of experience, seeking to develop expertise as a database practitioner.
• Ability to be embedded within the DBA group and work on real production tasks under senior review.
• Expectation to meet engineering standards from the outset.
• A foundational understanding of database concepts, particularly PostgreSQL, is beneficial.

Team and Technical Environment

The DBA team's core stack is built around PostgreSQL, complemented by analytical and distributed databases. The team focuses on areas such as performance tuning, schema and migration review, replication and high availability, backup and recovery, capacity planning, observability, and incident response. Collaboration is key, with close interaction with product, platform, risk, and data engineering teams.

Application Information

This is a paid internship opportunity based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Qualified candidates are encouraged to apply.