DBA Intern
On-siteRiyadh, Riyadh Region, Saudi Arabia or Ksa, Far North Region, Republic of Cameroon
Job Summary
Investigate slow PostgreSQL queries by analyzing execution plans, proposing index changes, and validating impact on staging. Review DDL/DML change requests for lock implications, backfill safety, and rollback strategies. Maintain backup and point-in-time-recovery procedures while participating in restore drills and replica lag investigations. Support live database migrations, cross-cluster cutovers, and capacity planning for bloat and autovacuum tuning. Build observability dashboards, monitors, and post-incident write-ups. Maintain operational runbooks and support secure data handling reviews alongside security and risk teams. Participate in on-call shadowing alongside senior engineers. This internship is not educational by default; it is an engineering role with real responsibility for production tasks under senior review. Candidates must be self-funded and based in Saudi Arabia.
Required Qualifications
- 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
- 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
- Overall performance, ownership, and context involvement are expected at a full-time level
- Saudi passport required
Desired Qualifications
- 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
- Existing certifications (PostgreSQL Associate / Professional, GCP Database Engineer, AWS Database Specialty) — welcome but not required
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