Kairan Quazi, 14, has recently been hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX to work on the Starlink engineering team. Before receiving his engineering degree from Santa Clara University, Kairan Quazi passed the company’s “fun, technically challenging” interview procedure. Before starting his job as the youngest employee of SpaceX, he will shortly become the college’s youngest graduate.
Quazi wrote in a LinkedIn post last week, “Next stop: SpaceX! I will be joining the coolest company on the planet as a Software Engineer on the Starlink engineering team. One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
Earlier this year, the 14-year-old took to social media to indicate his preparation for a ‘major’ job interview. Weeks later, he shared a screenshot of his job acceptance letter from SpaceX. Quazi will be moving to Washington state with his mother to start work after completing his bachelor’s degree.
‘Fun, fearless, and driven by an intense intellectual curiosity.’
Quazi’s LinkedIn bio assures that he has a personality that is ‘fun, fearless, and driven by an intense intellectual curiosity.’ His bright nature was evident from an early age, as he was speaking in full sentences by the age of two, just months after his birth.
His first day of preschool coincided with the Arab Spring uprising, which was marked by a protest march. “He got up and declared that school was boring. And then, he got all of his friends in the classroom to start marching, chanting: Free Egypt, democracy now. He was 2. We were dumbfounded,” his mother Julia told Mercury News recently.
Since then, Quazi’s achievements have only become more extraordinary. He qualified as “profoundly gifted,” with an IQ above the 99.9th percentile of the general population. Although he may have made his preschool classmates cry by revealing that Syria’s Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons, his parents assert that Quazi is also incredibly socially attuned.
Quazi started at Las Positas College in Livermore at the age of 10 and soon secured an internship at Intel Labs as an AI research co-op fellow. By the age of 11, he had transferred to Santa Clara to focus on computer science and engineering.