Inside the Vercel intern experience
By Steven Van ·
The best way to learn is by shipping product to users in production, and that's why we don’t treat our interns as temporary guests.
Vercel's Winter '26 intern cohort, four students from the University of Waterloo, spent four months in the San Francisco office shipping production features across the CDN, v0, and Vercel's financial infrastructure, rather than working on isolated, low-visibility intern projects.
- Yash Kothari (CDN team) built project-level routing, letting customers edit redirects, rewrites, and header transforms from the dashboard, API, CLI, or SDK without redeploying. He also shipped the vercel firewall CLI command and an AI-powered Firewall Rule Builder that turns a natural-language description into a WAF custom rule.
- Kavin Valli (v0 team) built Folders and v0 Projects end-to-end, shipped a manual commit button to close a gap in v0's version history, and restructured VM infrastructure into tiered pools, cutting memory usage and infrastructure cost for around 80% of sandboxes. He later took over the v0 Slack agent, adding preview deployments, a rebuilt router agent, and a full PR flow.
- Mingchung Xia (Financial Infrastructure team) shipped the v1/billing/charges API and the vercel usage CLI command, which reports usage and costs in the FOCUS v1.3 FinOps format; the work became a joint launch with Vantage and was adopted by Meta, Notion, and Porsche, among others. He also designed Vercel's core entitlements system and shipped Vercel Buy, a new billing service for agent, gateway, and v0 credits and Pro subscriptions. Mingchung will join Vercel full-time on the Financial Infrastructure team after graduating.
- Kevin Thomas (v0 team) built v0's auto model routing system, which classifies prompts and routes them to the right model tier; by launch it had processed over 1.4 million v0 messages and became the default for non-enterprise users. He later worked on the v0 x Snowflake integration, including enterprise admin controls for model access and RBAC for team skill management.
The full writeup, including more from each intern, is in Vercel's post.
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