Meet Kairan Quazi 14-Year-Old Prodigy Hired By Elon's SpaceX

Meet Kairan Quazi: The 14-Year-Old Prodigy Hired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX

SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, recently made headlines by hiring a remarkable 14-year-old prodigy, Kairan Quazi, to join its Starlink engineering team. Despite his young age, Quazi successfully cleared the company’s ‘technically challenging, fun’ interview process ahead of his graduation from Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering. Once he completes his studies, Quazi will make history as the youngest-ever graduate from the college and assume his role as SpaceX’s youngest employee to date.

“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 One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post last week.

Earlier this year, the ambitious 14-year-old hinted at preparing for a significant job interview through his social media posts. Weeks later, he delightedly revealed a screenshot of his job acceptance letter from SpaceX. After receiving his bachelor’s degree, Quazi and his mother will relocate to Washington state, where he will commence his work with the pioneering aerospace company.

Quazi’s LinkedIn bio describes him as a person with a “fun, fearless” personality, driven by intense intellectual curiosity. Remarkably, his brilliance manifested itself early in his life, as he began forming complete sentences by the age of two. An incident during his first day of preschool left a lasting impression when he led his classmates in a protest march amid the Arab Spring uprising.

His mother, Julia, recounted the incident, saying, “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.”

Since then, Quazi’s extraordinary achievements have continued to amaze. Being classified as “profoundly gifted” with an IQ surpassing the 99.9th percentile of the general population, he has consistently displayed exceptional intellectual abilities. Although he may have surprised his preschool peers by discussing Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and chemical weapons, his parents emphasize that Quazi is also highly attuned to social dynamics.

At the age of 10, Quazi began his educational journey at Las Positas College in Livermore, eventually securing an internship at Intel Labs as an AI research co-op fellow. By the time he turned 11, he had transitioned to Santa Clara University, focusing his studies on computer science and engineering, setting the stage for his future endeavors.