At just 16 years old, Kairan Quazi has already gained accolades most engineers spend decades accumulating: graduated college, helped design software for SpaceX Starlink satellites, and turned down officers from Silicon Valley’s buzzy AI labs. Now, the prodigy is taking his next leap—not in Silicon Valley, but on Wall Street, where he’s joining Citadel Securities, a liquidity provider, as a quant developer.
A defiant attitude
Quazi’s path has been unconventional from the start. At 9, he left third grade for community college, went on to intern at Intel Labs at 10, and transferred to Santa Clara University at 11, eventually becoming the youngest graduate in its 172-year history.
In 2023, he made headlines when Elon Musk’s SpaceX hired him at just 14 years old, a “rare company,” Quazi said at the time, that didn’t use his age as an “arbitrary and outdated proxy for maturity and ability.”
The same year, he sparred with Microsoft-owned LinkedIn after it locked him out of the platform for being under 16, blasting the decision as “illogical, primitive nonsense.” In fact, Quazi has never been shy about critiquing the traditional system that held him back. Once LinkedIn allowed him back on to their platform, Quazi posted a comment slamming the conventional school system. The 16-year-old argued “tests are not used to measure mastery, but the ability to regurgitate,” and that the modern “school factory” rewards fear and prestige-chasing over learning.
“Age, privilege, and unconscious (sometimes even conscious) biases are used to gatekeep opportunities,” he wrote, adding that philosophers like Seneca the Younger and Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius might have seen today’s education system as dangerous.
Two years later, Quazi is channeling that same defiance into a different arena. He turned down offers from top AI startups and tech firms to join Citadel Securities this week in New York, citing the firm’s culture of meritocracy and instant feedback.
“Quant finance offers a pretty rare combination: the complexity and intellectual challenge that AI research also provides, but with a much faster pace,” he told Business Insider. At Citadel, he said, he’ll be able to see the results of his work in “days, not months or years.”
A win-win
Citadel, for its part, has every reason to trumpet the win. The firm, which handles roughly 35% of U.S. retail stock trades and generated nearly $10 billion in revenue in 2024, is locked in a talent war with the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. Recruiting a prodigy who was once deemed too young for LinkedIn—but now works at the intersection of engineering and quantitative problem-solving—is a symbolic coup for Ken Griffin’s trading powerhouse.
For Quazi, the move also closes a personal loop. His mother worked in mergers and acquisitions as an investment banker, giving him early exposure to finance. And on campus, he saw how coveted quant jobs had become for math and computer-science students.
“It’s one of the most prestigious industries you could go into as a computer scientist or mathematician,” he told Business Insider.
Now, he’s living that reality in New York City. Quazi has moved into an apartment just a 10-minute walk from Citadel’s Park Avenue office.
“New York has a very special place in my heart,” he said, noting that his mom grew up in Astoria, Queens.
Unlike his time at SpaceX, where his mother had to drive him to work in Redmond, Washington, Quazi’s commute is now his own: first on foot, and soon, by subway.
“I felt ready to take on new challenges and expand my skill set into a different high-performance environment,” he said. “Citadel Securities offered a similarly ambitious culture, but also a completely new domain, which is very exciting for me.”
Jackie Scharnick, Citadel’s communications director, said Quazi would pass on an interview with Fortune so he could “focus on his second day of work.”
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