- SpaceX has hired a young prodigy to join its Starlink division as a software engineer.
- 14-year-old Kairan Quazi will graduate this month from Santa Clara University in California.
- He started studying computer science and engineering at the age of 11.
The latest recruit at SpaceX is a software engineer who passed its "technically challenging" and "fun" interview process.
What's different about Kairan Quazi is that he's just 14 years old.
He said in a LinkedIn post on Thursday: "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 One of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability."
The post came shortly before his graduation from Santa Clara University's school of engineering, becoming the youngest person to do so, the Seattle Times reported. He's planning to make the move from Pleasanton, California with his mother to start work at SpaceX in Redmond, Washington, per the report.
Quazi's extraordinary journey started at the age of two, when he could speak in complete sentences. By kindergarten he was telling other kids and teachers about news stories he'd heard on the radio, according to the Los Angeles Times.
After finding that his schoolwork wasn't challenging enough in the third grade, aged 9, his parents helped him enroll at a community college in California, per the report.
"I felt like I was learning at the level that I was meant to learn," he told the LA Times.
That same year he was placed in the 99.9th percentile of the general population in an IQ test, his family told BrainGain magazine.
Quazi landed an internship as an AI research co-op fellow at Intel Labs a few months later and by the age of 11 he transferred to Santa Clara University to study computer science and engineering.
Last year he spent four months as a machine learning intern at cyber intelligence firm Blackbird.AI, according to his LinkedIn profile. He helped design an "anomaly detection statistical learning pipeline" to flag if social media content has been manipulated, according to his profile.
Quazi told ABC7 News: "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 middle school now."
It appears he's already achieved one ambition by landing the Starlink job. "It is my dream to have a career tackling challenging issues and effecting radical innovation in service of the common good," he wrote on his LinkedIn biography.
Starlink is SpaceX's satellite internet service and started operating in January in Nigeria – its first African market.
Starlink did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.