Diary of an Intern: Building the Future of Crypto at Gemini

Over the past few years, Gemini has made our internship program a key component of the company’s hiring strategy. Rather than a job shadow experience, Gemini interns are thrown directly into operations, becoming true builders while gaining real-world experience.

I finished my eight-month long internship at Gemini. This has been a legendary run and I am grateful to everyone who was a part of it.

Here's the dump of what I've been up to:

The Work

I worked with quite a variety of teams over the last eight months, which meant working with lots of different mindsets and priorities.

Most of my time was spent in Credit Card and Internal Tooling and my projects included both consumer features and the invisible infrastructure that helps those features deploy nicely.

Product verticals like credit card in general are very fun to work with because of the immediate connection between the code you write and the product your friends use. I can mentally map the 10 or so APIs and services called every time I tap my Gemini card or even my Amex. There's something uniquely satisfying about seeing an abstraction you worked on become part of someone's everyday interaction with a product.

But Tools is equally interesting, because it is still the same job except your end users are well-educated engineers who will not take BS.

Interning at Gemini is as close as you can get to being a full-time SWE while being an intern. A big part of software engineering is maintaining and making existing systems faster and your team at Gemini does not want you to make a paper project throughout the period and present it to the team on the last day.

All five of my projects were shipped and they are used by engineers and Gemini users everyday. That, more than anything, is what I'll take away from this experience.

Ownership

If I were to summarize the past few months in one word, that would be Ownership. You have to think beyond the code and understand the broader organizational and technical implications of what you're building in order to succeed.

For most of my projects, I was the only intern working on them (of course, with help from mentors and owners), but I was responsible for the whole lifecycle, from writing RFC to addressing user feedback. There were even times when I was the primary engineering contact for the vendors. That's where most of the learning happened.

It’s one thing to write code for a ticket. It’s another thing to design something when the requirements are unclear, people have different priorities, and you don't know the true stakeholders.

AI

There has been an immense improvement in AI tooling this year - for both proprietary and open-weight models. It's become significantly faster to ship well-tested code in larger codebases, and that changes the nature of the job.

As implementation becomes increasingly commoditized, more of the engineering value shifts toward judgment: understanding the problem, identifying the right abstraction, and anticipating the impact of a change beyond the diff itself.

But imo this shift also makes engineering judgment more crucial. While no one needs to read every line of code anymore, it's more important and, to be honest, harder than ever to understand what the code is actually doing and how a change propagates through everything around it.

It’s really easy to drift away from that and become a slop factory.

Another thing I've noticed is that there is a certain amount of ball knowledge retained by mid-to-senior engineers that is difficult to capture in a prompt or a codebase. I am not saying it’s impossible for coding agents to get there but I think we still have a journey to reach that point.

And honestly, that makes the next few years pretty damn interesting.

Market

Interesting times for the industry. Every piece of news around you sounds bullish until you see order books.

Now, while the market graphs make you wanna cry, this has been a HUGE year for the technology, especially when it comes to stablecoins, agentic payments, etc.

Tech that felt experimental a few years ago is now becoming infrastructure for big firms. And for most of us, that underlying shift in adoption matters far more than short-term price action or market sentiment.

Whatever shape the next cycle takes, it's getting built on this.

What's next?

So yeah, that was my last eight months.

I am going back to school this fall as I have one more year more to go. idk what happens after school. Maybe go back to Gemini, maybe build a startup, or maybe drop out and become a full-time trader.

All I know is that until then, we're gonna lock tf in and ship.

Whatever it takes to unlock that 25th hour.

Peace.