DBA Intern

About the Role

Join Tabby’s Infrastructure team as a Database Administrator (DBA) Intern and take ownership of critical database systems that power financial products used by millions across the GCC. This is not a passive learning experience—it is a hands-on engineering role where you will contribute to the reliability, performance, and security of Tabby’s transactional and analytical databases. As part of the Database Engineers group, you will work alongside seasoned professionals to ensure seamless operations across payment flows, risk pipelines, marketplace services, and the data platform.

Your Impact

In this role, you will be entrusted with real production responsibilities, including performance tuning, schema optimization, and high-availability strategies. You will collaborate closely with cross-functional teams such as product, platform, risk, and data engineering to maintain the operational health of Tabby’s core database stack, which is built around PostgreSQL and complemented by analytical and distributed databases. This internship is designed for early-career engineers who are eager to grow as database practitioners and make a tangible difference in a fast-paced, security-critical environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Query Optimization: Investigate slow queries by analyzing execution plans, query statistics, and performance bottlenecks. Propose and validate optimizations such as index changes or query rewrites to enhance efficiency.
• Schema and Migration Review: Evaluate DDL/DML change requests from product teams, assessing lock implications, backfill safety, rollout strategies, and rollback plans to ensure seamless deployments.
• Backup and Recovery Operations: Maintain and refine backup procedures, participate in restore drills, and ensure point-in-time recovery capabilities are robust and reliable.
• Replication and High Availability: Contribute to replication operations, including streaming replicas, promotion runbooks, replica lag investigations, and connection pool tuning to support uninterrupted service.
• Database Migrations: Support live database migrations and cross-cluster cutovers by validating pre-cutover conditions, monitoring during transitions, and performing post-cutover checks to minimize downtime.
• Data-Migration Tooling: Assist in operating data-migration tooling by reviewing deployments, managing migration batches under senior approval, and monitoring key migration metrics.
• Capacity Planning: Triage capacity and resource issues, including bloat management, autovacuum tuning, partition maintenance, and IOPS planning to ensure optimal database performance.
• Observability and Monitoring: Build and refine dashboards, monitors, and query statistics to track performance, replication lag, and wait events, enabling proactive issue resolution.
• Operational Documentation: Maintain and update operational runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and post-incident write-ups to ensure knowledge continuity and compliance.
• Security and Compliance: Support secure data handling reviews in collaboration with security and risk teams, focusing on PII fields, encryption at rest, and role-based access controls.
• On-Call Support: Participate in on-call shadowing alongside senior engineers to develop incident response skills and contribute to a resilient operational framework.

Skills and Qualifications

Required:

• Working knowledge of at least one programming or scripting language, such as Python, Go, or Bash.
• Strong SQL proficiency, including joins, aggregation, window functions, CTEs, and subqueries.
• Solid understanding of relational database fundamentals, including ACID properties, transaction isolation levels, indexes (B-tree, hash), normalization, and key constraints.
• Ability to read and interpret execution plans (EXPLAIN, EXPLAIN ANALYZE) to optimize query performance.
• Familiarity with Linux command line and POSIX-like environments, as well as basic networking concepts such as TCP/IP and DNS.
• Experience reading, understanding, and modifying existing codebases, along with proficiency in Git and standard development workflows.
• Strong ethical mindset and discretion, with a commitment to maintaining the confidentiality of sensitive production data.
• Proficiency in English for documentation and team communication, with the ability to provide and receive constructive feedback.

Preferred:

• Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, whether through personal projects, university coursework, or open-source contributions.
• Exposure to other data stores such as ClickHouse, CockroachDB, Redis, MongoDB, or Kafka.
• Understanding of replication concepts, including logical vs. physical replication, streaming, WAL, and replication slots.
• Familiarity with Change Data Capture (CDC) patterns, tools like Debezium or Flink, and logical replication consumers.
• Experience with connection poolers such as PgBouncer or similar technologies.