SpaceX has hired its newest software engineer, Kairan Quazi, who is just 14 years old. Quazi passed SpaceX’s technically challenging and fun interview process, and will be joining the Starlink engineering team. He stated that SpaceX is one of the rare companies that did not use his age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability. Quazi is graduating from Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering, becoming the youngest person to do so. He is planning to relocate from Pleasanton, California to Redmond, Washington with his mother to start his work at SpaceX.
At the tender age of two, Quazi could speak in complete sentences. By kindergarten, he was telling people about news stories he heard on the radio. After finding that his schoolwork was not challenging enough, his parents helped him enroll at a community college in California at age 9. That same year, he was placed in the 99.9th percentile of the general population in an IQ test. He later landed an internship as an AI research co-op fellow at Intel Labs at the age of 11, proving his computer science skills.
Last year, Quazi spent four months as a machine learning intern at cyber intelligence firm Blackbird.AI, where he helped design an anomaly detection statistical learning pipeline to flag if social media content has been manipulated. He believes that there is a conventional mindset of missing out on childhood, but he disagrees and thinks that he is learning what he was meant to learn.
Quazi’s dream is to have a career tackling challenging issues and effecting radical innovation in service of the common good. He has achieved one of his ambitions by landing the Starlink job. Starlink is SpaceX’s satellite internet service which started operating in January in Nigeria, marking its first African market. SpaceX has not yet responded to a request for comment on this new hire.
