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 across payment flows, risk pipelines, marketplace services, and the data platform.
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.
What you will do
This is not a helper or shadow-only role. Interns work on real production tasks under senior review.
- 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, 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.
