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

SEE FULL BIOA single software engineer has become the most common hire in Silicon Valley

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The saga began after a viral post by Mixpanel’s former CEO accused him of scamming YC-funded companies

Startup founders say Parekh aced interviews, faked credentials, and offered wild excuses—ranging from drone strikes to visa issues—before vanishing

At least 10 companies reportedly hired and fired him for lying and underperforming

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 companies

The saga began on Wednesday when Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, issued a warning 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

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

However, the institute told Fortune in a statement that they were “unable to find any record of enrollment at Georgia for a person with that name. ” In an interview on the daily show TBPN, Parekh confirmed the claims he was holding down multiple jobs at the same time, saying: “I’m not ud of what I’ve done

That’s not something I endorse either

Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our ducts to market. ” ‘He really crushed my interview’ Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of AI startup Leaping AI, wasn’t surprised when he saw the now-infamous engineer was on X

Telegin told Fortune he’d made Parekh a job offer in April after being blown away by the engineer in the interview cess. “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 able person. ” “I offered him a salary range of $160,000 to $200,000 per year base compensation plus equity ranging from around 0. 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 cess of getting his O-1 visa—a type of visa reserved for individuals who possess extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, 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 duced and wrote code, but he was insanely slow

And there were always these excuses 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 d 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. ” Founders realize they’re ‘dating the same guy’ A month later, when Telegin was visiting a fellow founder from his Y Combinator cohort, the pair got chatting their AI hiring woes

The war for AI talent is particularly tough on startups right now as companies are competing for an increasingly small pool of talent

Big companies are shelling out eye-watering salaries, making it difficult for startups with fewer funds to compete. “Hiring is the biggest blem for any YC company, including us and including them,” he said. “We’ve been chatting 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 : ‘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 a dream,” he said. “I don’t think anybody hired him in my batch,” he added. “But he was definitely paid for work trials. ” ‘Then the excuses started’ 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 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 file 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 der,” he said

Parekh never did and was later terminated

He also said there were issues with his performance and a string of what he came to believe were habitual lies

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

Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to a request for from Fortune

In a post on X, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the”The Pragmatic Engineer”, 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 ly many, many more. ”Introducing the 2025 Fortune 500, the definitive ranking of the biggest companies in America

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