Indian software engineer Soham Parekh has become the focus of a Silicon Valley hiring controversy after multiple founders said he secretly held several full-time roles at once. Playground AI and Mixpanel co-founder Suhail Doshi warned on 2 July that Parekh was “working at three to four startups at the same time,” prompting at least five other Y Combinator-backed companies to confirm they had either dismissed him or halted trials when the overlap emerged. Several employers say Parekh used a fabricated résumé and claimed a pending O-1 visa to secure positions, while one former boss alleges he falsely cited a drone strike during the India-Pakistan “Operation Sindoor” border flare-up to explain missed deadlines. Parekh has since acknowledged the moonlighting, telling tech podcast TBPN he worked up to 140 hours a week and “was in extremely dire financial circumstances.” He said he is “not proud” of the deception but insisted he completed all coding himself. Despite the admissions, Parekh has accepted an exclusive founding-engineer post at San Francisco-based Darwin Studios, an AI video-remixing startup. The episode has rekindled debate over remote-work oversight, background checks and the ease with which skilled candidates can move between venture-backed companies without rigorous verification.