A newly hired employee at Elon Musk’s SpaceX is the youngest person ever to join the company’s workforce.
Meet 14-year-old software engineer Kairan Quazi who cleared SpaceX’s “technically challenging, fun” interview process.
In a LinkedIn post, Quazi said, “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 One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
As mentioned in his post, last year he spent four months as a machine learning intern at cyber intelligence firm Blackbird.AI. He also helped design an “anomaly detection statistical learning pipeline” to flag if social media content has been manipulated.
“Next stop…SpaceX!!! I accepted a position as Software Engineer at one of the coolest companies on the planet! Thank you everyone for continuing to follow my crazy journey!” said Quazi in a written post to his Instagram page, which included screenshots of his SpaceX job offer.
Quazi will be the youngest hire in the history of SpaceX.
According to a Seattle Times report, Quazi’s post came shortly before he graduated from Santa Clara University’s School of Engineering, becoming the youngest person to do so.
“He can code in 12 languages. I don’t think I’m even smart enough to ask you a question,” said KRON news anchor Darya Folsom. “I’m a little intimidated. How did you get into college when you were just nine years old?”
As per the report, Quazi intends to relocate from Pleasanton, California, along with his mother, to begin working at SpaceX’s Redmond, Washington location.
Quazi’s journey began at the age of two. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, he was already captivating fellow students and teachers by the time he reached kindergarten with his discussions about news stories he had heard on the radio.
“I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn,” Qazi told the LA Times.
In an interview with ABC7 News, Quazi said, “I think there’s a conventional mindset that I’m missing out on childhood, but I don’t think that’s true. I think, again, that mindset would have me graduating from middle school now.”
Produced in association with Benzinga
Edited by Alberto Arellano and Joseph Hammond
