Kairan Quazi ’23, who became Santa Clara University’s youngest-ever graduate and joined SpaceX as a software engineer at 14, is now beginning a new role as a quant developer at Citadel Securities in New York. At just 16, Quazi chose quantitative finance over offers from leading AI labs and tech companies, drawn to the fast pace, merit-based culture, and opportunity to work in a different domain. After spending two years on one of Starlink’s most intense software teams where he led projects that had global impact, he saw Citadel as a logical continuation of applying his engineering skills in a high-performance environment. Quazi’s path has been extraordinary: he leapt from third grade to college by age 9, interned at Intel Labs from the age of 10 until graduation, and was inducted into Guinness World Records as the youngest engineer in the world.