An over-employed engineer was caught secretly working for multiple Silicon Valley startups at once—picking up salary offers of up to $200K per job
A single software engineer has become the most-hired person in Silicon Valley. The engineer, Soham Parekh, has admitted that he had been working across multiple up-and-coming Silicon Valley startups at the same time after he went viral on social media.
Startup founders told Fortune that Parekh would ace early interviews, land high-paying jobs, and then ghost employers when work began.
They say Parekh came up with creative excuses for late or poor quality work, before they discovered that he was simultaneously working for multiple tech companies. He'd been offered salaries of up to $200,000 per year in base compensation by founders.
The saga began on Wednesday when Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, issued a warning about him on X.
'PSA: there's a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He's been preying on YC companies and more. Beware. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn't stopped a year later. No more excuses,' Doshi wrote in a post on X.
The post was quickly flooded with replies from fellow founders with similar stories, including a few who claimed to still have Parekh on their payroll.
Related: Bosses are catching on to their 'overemployed' staff—one worker says they're making $3K a day doing 5 jobs
Doshi shared the engineer's CV in a follow-up post, which listed multiple companies, work experience, and a master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in computer science. However, the institute told Fortune in a statement that they were 'unable to find any record of enrollment at Georgia Tech for a person with that name.'
In an interview on the daily tech show TBPN, Parekh confirmed the claims he was holding down multiple jobs at the same time, saying: 'I'm not proud of what I've done. That's not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity.'
He added he made the choice because he was 'in extremely dire financial circumstances.'
When reached for comment, Parekh referred Fortune to Sanjit Juneja, Founder and CEO of Darwin, who shared this statement: 'At Darwin, we are solely focused on building the most innovative software products for both brands and content creators. Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market.'
Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of AI startup Leaping AI, wasn't surprised when he saw the now-infamous engineer was trending on X.
Telegin told Fortune he'd made Parekh a job offer in April after being blown away by the engineer in the interview process.
'He really crushed my interview. I interviewed around 50 people in the prior two weeks before talking to him and he passed, by far, all of the people I interviewed,' he said. 'He also was a very likeable person.'
'I offered him a salary range of $160,000 to $200,000 per year base compensation plus equity ranging from around 0.7% to 1.1%, he chose the middle of the cash and middle of the equity,' Telegin said. 'I told him to come to San Francisco and we could sign the papers.'
Telegin said Parekh told him he was in the process of getting his O-1 visa—a type of visa reserved for individuals who possess extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics—but wanted to contribute remotely while he was still in India. However, almost immediately after the company onboarded him, Parekh started behaving strangely.
'He produced and wrote code, but he was insanely slow. And there were always these excuses like a flood or the electricity went out, and then the [Indo-Pakistan conflict] happened—but he was so far away from the conflict,' Telegin said.
Parekh had told Telegin he was based in Mumbai, more than a thousand miles away from the fighting near Jammu and Kashmir, but later claimed a drone had damaged the building he lived in.
Telegin said he assumed Parekh was picking up some work on the side and decided to formally pay him for his time, with the aim of locking in the engineer exclusively with a formal full-time employment contract which he would sign when he got to San Francisco, where the role was full-time, in-office.
'I thought if I pay him, then it's official … he's going to contribute and commit, but he never sent an invoice. In the end, I didn't transfer him a single dollar, which is the most confusing part of it all, because other people seem to have paid him.'
A month later, when Telegin was visiting a fellow founder from his Y Combinator cohort, the pair got chatting about their AI hiring woes.
The war for AI talent is particularly tough on startups right now as tech companies are competing for an increasingly small pool of talent. Big Tech companies are shelling out eye-watering salaries, making it difficult for startups with fewer funds to compete.
'Hiring is the biggest problem for any YC company, including us and including them,' he said. 'We've been chatting about our hiring pains while describing people we've been talking to, and then we both started describing Soham to each other. Then the next moment it was like: 'Wait, are we dating the same guy?''
Later, Telegin realized that his friend was merely the tip of the iceberg. Within his YC batch, Soham had interviewed or worked with three other companies.
'It was just surreal … At some dinner events, somebody would start saying: 'Oh, I'm interviewing this cool guy, he crushed my interview' and then people would say in unison: 'Oh, is it Soham?' And then the person telling the story would freak out, because what the hell is going on? It's like a dream,' he said.
'I don't think anybody hired him in my batch,' he added. 'But he was definitely paid for work trials.'
Marcus Lowe, co-founder of Create, also had Parekh on the payroll as a full-time independent contractor for around two weeks earlier this year, during which the engineer made one appearance in the office and shipped almost no code.
'He's just a really strong engineer and he crushed the interview,' Lowe told Fortune. 'But about a week before he was scheduled to start, he texted us saying he needed to go to New York to visit his sister and needed to push the start date back.'
'Then the day before he was supposed to start, he texted us saying he was feeling sick and wasn't able to come in, so we pushed back the start date again,' he said.
'By this point, it was actually two weeks late before he came into the office for one day and he did good work … then the excuses started again.'
Lowe had signed Parekh up as an independent contractor in a deal that included five days of in-office work and a base compensation of $150,000. Lowe only saw him in the flesh for one day.
Suspicious, he went to Parekh's GitHub profile to investigate, saw he had committed code to another San Francisco-based startup. He went down to the offices to ask if Parekh worked there. He was told the engineer did, but was out sick.
'Long story short, we kept pushing him to come into the office, but he never did again. Eventually, we just gave him a performance conversation and said you're not shipping enough code, we need you to actually deliver,' he said. Parekh never did and was later terminated.
Another Silicon Valley-based founder told Fortune he hired Parekh for a work trial in 2024 but decided not to move forward with him after it became clear he couldn't move to the US.
He also said there were issues with his performance and a string of what he came to believe were habitual lies. He paid Parekh $2,400 for the week.
All of the founders Fortune spoke to said they had heard of multiple other incidents where the engineer was working more than one job at once, some as long as three years ago.
He also appears to have had a brief stint at Meta in 2021. Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.
In a post on X, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the'The Pragmatic Engineer' newsletter, said he had 'confirmed 10 companies where [Parekh] was hired and fired for doing nothing (but lying to them.) And another 8 that interviewed him but rejected him (many feel they have wasted their time.) There are likely many, many more.'
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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