After making waves for getting a job at SpaceX’s Starlink at the precocious age of 14, Bay Area boy wonder Kairan Quazi is preparing to leave the nest, move to New York, and get a new job.
Quazi, now 16, explained to Business Insider why he’s leaving Starlink to work for Citadel Securities, one of the world’s biggest stock trading firms that specializes in the rapid-fire algorithmic transactions of quantitative finance.
“After two years at SpaceX,” the precocious teen told BI, “I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment.”
Despite sounding a bit like a cover letter, that statement is pretty telling — especially for a teen as gifted as Quazi, who at 14, just before he started at SpaceX, became the youngest person ever to graduate from Santa Clara University.
Though he suggests his junior engineer role was fulfilling and maintains that working on Starlink offered him a “broad scope and a lot of responsibility,” it seems, when reading between the lines, that Quazi’s brilliance may not have been properly utilized at the Elon Musk-owned rocket company.
Instead of grabbing coffee or laundry like so many young interns, the teen whiz was tasked with designing and executing beam-tracking software for Starlink’s satellites, a daunting task that involved “developing ideas and presenting them to other engineers and leadership, ultimately implementing them, and monitoring the rollouts.”
While he found that SpaceX had an “ambitious” culture that required “high-performance,” Quazi seemed to imply that things moved too slowly for his liking at SpaceX. Ultimately, that desire to move fast and make — not break — things led to him turning lots of other job offers to join Citadel Securities, the sister trading firm to billionaire Ken Griffin’s hedge fund Citadel LLC.
“Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace,” the juvenile genius told BI. “At Citadel Securities, I’ll be able to see measurable impact in days, not months or years like many research environments.”
The trading firm’s openness to his unconventional background — a demure way of saying he’s a dyed-in-the-wool wunderkind — was also attractive to Quazi.
“They moved very quickly,” he said, “and didn’t use my age or years of experience to gate-keep opportunities.”
At this new gig, Quazi will be moving cross-country from Redmond, Washington, where the SpaceX campus he worked at is located, to New York City. Though there will invariably be some growing pains, the prodigy isn’t too concerned about being in the Big Apple on his own. As he told the website, his mother — herself a former investment banker — grew up in Astoria, Queens, and he’s been visiting since he was (even) younger.
Overall, Quazi’s cross-country move away from SpaceX seems like a great career trajectory for someone as unique and brilliant as he — and in NYC,…
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