Winter 2026 internships: How Vercel puts newcomers in production paths
Vercel treats its interns as full members of engineering teams rather than temporary guests, according to the company. This past winter, a small cohort of interns worked from the company's San Francisco headquarters for four months, contributing to the CDN, v0, financial infrastructure, and AI Gateway. Their work shipped to production and touched products used by millions of people.
Each person in the Winter 2026 intern cohort shipped product to production.
CDN and Firewall work
Yash Kothari, a University of Waterloo student on the CDN team, worked across the full stack — from infrastructure to CLI to dashboard UI. His first major project was project-level routing, part of the new CDN tab in the Vercel dashboard. This lets customers update routing rules like redirects, rewrites, and header transforms from the dashboard, API, CLI, or SDK without redeploying or touching code. Kothari built the underlying API endpoints, including a staging/publish workflow, the vercel routes CLI commands, and contributed AI-powered route generation. Hundreds of teams adopted the feature shortly after launch.
In the second half of his term, he shipped the vercel firewall CLI command, enabling users and AI agents to configure custom rules, IP blocks, and firewall controls from the terminal. He also built an AI-powered Firewall Rule Builder that turns natural language descriptions into WAF custom rules automatically.
v0 platform and infrastructure
Kavin Valli, also from the University of Waterloo, covered the full v0 platform. He built Folders and v0 Projects end-to-end: CRUD operations, a library page redesign, favoriting, visibility controls, and folder sharing. He also shipped the manual commit button, which ensures manual edits in the VM editor correctly create commits and blocks, closing the loop between manual changes and v0's iteration model.
His highest-leverage contribution came later in the term around VM and sandbox infrastructure. By splitting VMs into tiered pools and routing smaller projects to a cost-efficient default pool, Valli reduced memory usage and infrastructure cost for roughly 80% of sandboxes. He wrapped up by taking ownership of the v0 Slack agent, shipping preview deployments, rebuilding the router agent with improved thread history and SAML re-auth resume, redesigning project context tracking, and building the full PR flow with v0 labels, Slack thread links, and state tracking.
Kevin Thomas, also on the v0 team, proposed and built v0's auto model routing system — a full pipeline that assigns user prompts to the right model tier based on complexity. He built the labeling pipeline, experimented with multiple classifier architectures including embedding-based MLP classifiers, TF-IDF baselines, and fine-tuned TinyBERT, and integrated the result into TypeScript-only functions for production. By launch, the system had processed over 1.4 million v0 messages and became the default for all non-enterprise users.
His enterprise work included the v0 × Snowflake integration: admin controls for model access, RBAC for team skill management, and fixes in SAML and isolated tenant environments. Thomas also served as a primary investigator for incidents around signup, billing, auth, and account access.
Financial infrastructure
Mingchung Xia from the University of Waterloo pushed over 250 PRs in four months and became one of the top contributors on Vercel's central control systems monorepo. His externally visible work included the v1/billing/charges API endpoint and vercel usage CLI command, which expose usage and cost data in the standardized FOCUS v1.3 FinOps format. Originally scoped as a full-internship project, Xia finished it early and expanded it into a joint launch with Vantage. Meta, Notion, Porsche, and other companies subsequently adopted the work to analyze Vercel spend.
His most technically complex project was designing and building Vercel's core entitlements system — the infrastructure for granting, revoking, and provisioning entitlements across project-based monetization, add-ons, enterprise, and marketplace work streams. The architecture incorporated strong and eventual consistency guarantees, async and synchronous derivations, transactional outboxing, write-ahead logs, plan change manifests, stale-validation sentinels, and materializations. It rolled out to production and was backfilled across all active subscriptions.
He finished by shipping Vercel Buy, a new billing service supporting purchases of agent credits, gateway credits, v0 credits, and pro subscriptions, with a CLI surface. Xia will return to Vercel full-time on the Financial Infrastructure team after finishing his degree.
AI Gateway migration
Sylvie Zhang, a University of Pennsylvania student on the AI Gateway team, worked across the service — from database and backend logic to observability, frontend, and documentation. Her most technically demanding project was the AI SDK v5 → v6 endpoint migration for AI Gateway's OpenAI-compatible and Anthropic-compatible endpoints. The AI provider landscape had grown more complex since v5 was designed, making the legacy version a bottleneck, particularly for handling token usage granularity differences across providers.
Zhang led the migration with systematic multi-turn and cross-provider testing scripts, concurrency testing to surface race conditions, proactive customer communication, and a deliberate fallback strategy that kept legacy code in place until the migration proved stable. Her earlier work included Price Strikethrough, which surfaces provider MSRP alongside Gateway pricing.
Intern advice for the next cohort
The interns offered five pieces of guidance for future cohorts:
- Take ownership from day one. Don't wait for assigned work — identify what needs to be done and start shipping.
- Ask questions. All five interns emphasized that Vercel employees won't make you feel like a burden for asking.
- Work in public. Share PRs in team channels, post updates, and present at Demo Days to build trust faster.
- Talk to people outside your team. Cross-team conversations with engineers, designers, and finance offer valuable perspective.
- Give yourself time to ramp up. The first few weeks are for absorbing the codebase and culture, not sprinting.
Vercel says additional internship opportunities will be listed on its career site in September.
