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.
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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.”
‘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 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, be