The 10x “overlemployed” engineer
A software engineer worked at several AI startups at the same time, without his employers knowing anything about it. Then one frustrated founder who hired him went public…
The 2002 movie Catch Me if You Can stars Leonardo Di Caprio as a talented 19-year-old fraudster, who forges millions of dollars in checks while pretending to be a doctor, a lawyer, and even an airline pilot. That Hollywood film now has echoes in the tech industry, in a story which has come to light in Silicon Valley.
A software engineer in their mid-twenties, based in India, successfully scammed approximately a million dollars annually from tech startups by excelling in interviews, getting hired remotely, and then not doing their assigned work, all while being simultaneously employed by many companies.
As in ‘Catch Me if You Can’, in this story there’s an unusually talented main character who gets into a dramatic showdown once exposed.
Today’s issue covers what happened, and some learnings from this highly unusual incident:
Exposé. An engineer named Soham Parekh is accused on social media of working at multiple Y Combinator startups at the same time by one employer, and other workplaces come forward.
18 companies that hired, or nearly hired this engineer. Almost all are recently-founded AI startups.
Excuses, excuses… This engineer was hard to contact, and had bizarre reasons as to why.
Skyrocketing demand for AI engineers. One thing is clear: demand for AI engineers is through the roof, and capable software engineers who can integrate LLMs are in high demand.
How did a dev outside the US get hired by hot Silicon Valley startups? False US work authorization status, Silicon Valley startups desperate to hire, and “business-minded 10x engineers” being in high demand, all helped.
Spotting “overemployed” software engineers. Suspicion of ‘overly green’ GitHub profiles, the importance of background checks, and recruitment advice from an ex-Facebook and ex-Uber founder of scaleup hiring business, Dynosaur Labs. Additionally, Digger founder Igor Zalutski confirms that Soham was genuinely among the top 0.1% of software engineers, in terms of both technical skills and business acumen.
What does it mean for remote work? Remote work makes being “overemployed” much easier – and AI tooling will make it even more so. Are more in-person interviews and hybrid work patterns a solution?
Update: shortly after publishing this article, Soham appeared in the TBPN podcast where he admitted to having worked multiple jobs in parallel since 2022, confirming the allegations in the below article.
1. Exposé
Yesterday (2 July), startup founder Suhail Doshi made an accusation: that a software engineer named Soham Parekh was working at several Y Combinator startups at once, and had been doing so for over a year, all while failing to do the work he was hired to do:
Initially, the post got a bit of pushback. After all, in California – where most startups which hired Parekh are based – it’s not forbidden to have a second job (aka ‘moonlighting’), as long as it doesn’t overlap with other commitments. Indeed, many leaders founded startups on the side of their main job, and an employer cannot claim intellectual property ownership of a new project which is fully separate from someone’s primary job.
What makes this story stand out is the unusually high number of parallel jobs this one dev took on. All together, the combined workload of all these roles was evidently impossible to maintain, and would inevitably lead to questions being asked by individual employers, who wondered why a clearly-talented engineer was unable to deliver their work.
Suhail said his issue was not that Parekh had a side job; it was something more fundamental:
Following Suhail’s post, reports from other startups began to emerge, with accusations that they had hired Parekh, and then fired him not long afterward.
He was exposed thanks to the Y Combinator founder community. Doshi went public with accusations after confirming with several other Y Combinator founders who’d had the same experience with Parekh. Garry Tan – president and CEO of Y Combinator – also shared his belief that without the Y Combinator founder community sharing information with one another, Parekh might have not been publicly exposed.
2. 18 companies that hired, or nearly hired him
As the drama played out online, things turned bad fast for Parekh. Other companies at which he worked reportedly started taking action, as per Suhail:
Many companies went on record about the fact they had employed and quickly dismissed Parekh. Links to companies below lead to their job pages, if they have one. All are hiring for fullstack software engineers or AI engineers.
Playground AI (YC19, AI-first graphics editor.) Hired Soham in 2024 and fired him after a week.
Leaping AI (YC W25, building voice AI agents that are human-like and self improve): hired him, then fired him when they found out he also worked elsewhere
Fuse AI (YC W25, agentic sales platform for GTM teams): fired him when they found out that Soham was working parallel at Leaping AI
Digger (Terraform pull request automation) onboarded him, but terminated him a few days into the job, founder Igor Zalutski told me. The company terminated Parekh when background checks raised red flags. Digger was conscious about the risk of “moving fast” in hiring before background checks completed, but this was a calculated risk.
Fleet AI (agent engineering platform). Hired and fired within a week.
Lindy (AI assistant platform). Hired and fired a week later. Aced the interview, but was slow with work.
Create (creating software with AI): hired him and promptly fired him. Create is an in-person startup. Amusingly, Soham showed up for one day at their SF office, but often had a reason why he could not attend.
Animetal (AI platform for infrastructure) Hired in 2022 and fired shortly thereafter. They realized he must be working multiple jobs.
Ponder.ai (video AI). Worked at the startup until the news broke, when he was fired.
ComfyUI (open source, Node.js-based app for GenAI) hired Parekh for 3 weeks in June. The interview went well, then things started to fall apart.
Then there are companies which interviewed Soham, but decided against employing him:
AIVideo.com (YC S23, AI-powered video production) They were very close to hiring him after he did very well on the interview.
Pally AI (YC S25, AI relationship management) They offered him a founding engineer role, which he rejected because the in-person requirement was non-negotiable.
Mosaic AI (YC W25, video editing AI agents). Spent a month interviewing Soham. Did great in interviews, but the company did not hire him.
Bestever AI (AI-powered, stunning ads). Interviewed him, but rejected after the initial screening.
Cassidy AI (AI automation powered by company data). Soham reached out to this company with an email discussed below.
Railway (infrastructure as a service). Rejected in 2023 during early screening.
An early-stage startup cofounded by former Warp engineer Michelle Lim booked him for a 3-day paid work trial, but cancelled it when the story came to light.
A startup advocating for “cheating on everything” also nearly got duped. Cluey is a startup building an AI tool to “cheat on everything”, and as fate would have it, the company’s founder and CEO shared that they were at the second-round interview stage with Parekh. The company shared interview notes taken during their session:
“Candidate Evaluation:
Candidate seen as knowledgeable in React and frontend optimization.
High-level answers are considered good; some fumbling through details noted.
Strong devops and infrastructure experience inferred from GitHub and past projects.
Candidate’s GitHub is reviewed, showing significant contributions and experience.
Comparison to other candidates in terms of technical strength and fit.
Discussion of candidate’s background (e.g., internships at Meta, Waterloo education).
General consensus that the candidate is a good fit, with a strong, "startery" profile.
Plan to schedule a follow-up interview for further evaluation.”
3. Excuses, excuses…
Parekh consistently delayed his supposedly-imminent relocation to the US. Most startups that employed him usually knew he was based in India, but all assumed he wanted to relocate to the US. He assured several employers that he was taking care of his O1 visa (discussed below). For example, here is an email sent to the CEO of Fleet AI:
“Ideally, I’d love to be in person. However I am also undergoing the renewal process for the current visa. Is it okay if I let you know earliest by this Tuesday if it would be possible to be in person in New York for this [the team working together]. At this point, I’d say it is 80% likely that I should be able to come in person.”
Excuses were frequent. One recurring feature was Parekh’s creative excuses for why he was slow at getting things done. Arkadiy Telegin, cofounder of Leaping AI, wondered why it took him so long to do pull requests. Parekh replied that a military drone had damaged his house during fighting between India and Pakistan. Later, it turned out he was not near the conflict zone:
It’s alleged Soham misled at least one employer about his location. A founder said they thought he was US-based, and even showed a company laptop sent to a US address. The laptop was later returned – Soham claimed it was sent to his sister. However, he never had a US address, and could not have one legally since he did not have any USA visa.
Igor Zalutski, founder of Digger (AI that understands infrastructure) gave me examples of what it was like working with Soham:
“He said he applied for o1 visa and paid for premium processing so he was "few weeks at most" away from getting it. He said that his lawyers told him it's just better to be out of the US while the application is ongoing, and after it's done he's back, he "got an apartment in North Beach (San Francisco)".
Later, a founder I background checked with told me that he [Soham] was telling them the same for over a year.
And funnily enough, Soham started his dirty tricks from the very first day: he asked to push his onboarding meeting to the next day. He wrote how “this is unusual but it’s been unusually windy and rainy so I think that might have messed with the internet wire, I will have someone look over it tomorrow.”
Digger AI terminated Soham’s contract a day or two into his onboarding. By that time, they had placed an order for an Apple laptop to be shipped to Parekh’s home address in India. Luckily, they could still cancel the order.
4. Skyrocketing demand for AI engineers
One puzzling part of the story is how he got hired by Silicon Valley startups, particularly by “cream of the crop” places like Y Combinator AI startups. These businesses are well-funded, offer good base salaries close to the $200K/year range for senior engineers, and also attract more candidates than average. But the reality is complicated, and also explains why some parts of the tech market are still “candidate’s markets”, compared to the norm.
This is a reminder that becoming an “AI engineer” as a software engineer is straightforward enough: we covered Seven examples of software engineers picking up AI engineering, The “AI engineering stack” with Chip Huyen, and How Janvi Kalra became an AI Engineer at Coda — which later helped her get hired at OpenAI.
This is why the market is so hot for AI engineers: