HAWTHORNE, Calif. — One of the newest employees at SpaceX has been described as a child prodigy who skipped elementary school and will graduate from college this week at the tender age of 14.
The spacecraft manufacturer offered a software engineering position to Kairan Quazi a month ago, according to an excerpt from an email from the company the teenager posted on Instagram. The Bay Area teenager, who is set to graduate this week from Santa Clara University, will be moving with his mother to Redmond, Washington, next month, so he can take up the SpaceX job, according to a post on LinkedIn.
Kairan said he's excited to join SpaceX, in part because it was "one of the rare companies that did not use my age as an arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability."
SpaceX will not need to obtain special permission to bring the youngster on board, as he meets the minimum legal age to work under Washington state law.
Neither Kairan nor SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk, responded immediately to requests for comment from CBS MoneyWatch Monday.
Kairan was born in Pleasanton, California, to Bangladeshi-American parents. His mother, Jullia Quazi told an ABC News affiliate in San Francisco that she began noticing her son was intellectually gifted when he began speaking in full sentences at age 2.
He left elementary school after finishing the third grade and enrolled in community college at age 9. Kairan transferred to Santa Clara University at age 11. In college, he had a multiyear internship at Intel as an artificial intelligence research fellow.
Kairan will receive his bachelor's degree in computer science and engineering from SCU on Saturday — the youngest graduate in the school's 172-year history, the San Jose Mercury News reported.
At SpaceX, Kairan said on LinkedIn he will be assigned to the engineering team at Starlink, the company's satellite broadband internet service. The Starlink system is designed to deliver high-speed internet to customers anywhere on Earth using thousands of broadband relay stations in multiple low-altitude orbits.
