Moonlight Sonata: What the Soham Parekh Saga Reveals About Work Today

Darwin Studios, a San Francisco-based startup, has hired Soham Parekh full-time. Yes, the 29-year-old Indian engineer whose name recently became a byword for moonlighting. Weeks ago, he stood at the centre of a Silicon Valley scandal, accused of holding five concurrent full-time roles at American startups, working—he claimed—140 hours a week. The numbers didn’t compute. The calendar refused to stretch. And yet, he somehow made it happen. Now, he has landed a new role as a founding engineer at a company where he will be helping build Wayve, an AI-driven platform for video remixing.

The rehire says less about Soham than about the world that has welcomed him back. “He’ll prove everyone wrong,” one of Darwin’s founders said. This time, the contract includes an exclusivity clause. But the cultural contract—that unspoken deal between founders and engineers, between hustle and hope—remains far murkier.

“Honestly? Soham broke the social contract, not just the legal one,” says a Mumbai-based SaaS founder. “That’s what stung. Not that he had five jobs. That he didn’t pick one dream and pretend it was ours.” What Soham broke wasn’t trust, it was illusion. Startups run on the fantasy of singular devotion, of the gifted engineer who sleeps under desks, breathes the roadmap, bleeds the mission. But work has changed. Remote-first became reference-check-last. GitHub became gospel. Presence became a green Slack dot. In this system, Soham simply optimised for opacity.

His interviews were dazzling. His commits, initially, impeccable. Founders now say the warning signs—missed standups, irregular contributions, timezone evasions—were there. But in the race from Series A to B, scrutiny is a luxury. “There’s this unspoken thing,” says a senior developer at a Delhi-based AI startup. “If you are brown and remote, you are expected to outwork everyone just to stay visible. I don’t condone what he did. But I get why he tried.”

Soham insists it wasn’t grift. It was survival. He denies delegating to juniors or using Copilot. “No one likes to work 140 hours a week,” he said. “But I had to do it.” What followed was not just outrage, but a wave of operational soul-searching in the tech industry, both in India and in the Valley. Moonlighting, once an HR footnote, has become existential. Companies have turned to firms like EY and OnGrid to monitor for multiple payrolls, concurrent PF contributions, calendar anomalies, GitHub overlaps. Some require exclusivity clauses with clawbacks. Others are leaning on workforce analytics to map commit velocity or idle time. But vigilance, if purely technical, will always lag behind human ingenuity. “We are building better detection,” says one Bengaluru-based founder, “but the real shift has to be cultural. If people don’t feel seen, they will disappear.”

In India, the Soham story is hardly singular. Moonlighting has long been a blurry moral category—tolerated, denied and quietly practiced. During the pandemic, it bloomed. Wipro sacked 300 employees in 2022 for “dual-timing”. Infosys called it “unethical”. Background-verification firms processed 23,000 employment checks in the first half of 2025—already 87% of the total for 2024—with 2,900 flagged for moonlighting red flags. An OnGrid case revealed a woman who, over seven years, held 141 jobs—up to ten at once—without detection. No Slack avatar, no LinkedIn posts. Just procedural manipulation: fake reference letters, dummy employers, alternate bank accounts. The fact is, the fantasy of employment as monogamy has splintered. Workers are asked to act like founders. Founders behave like platforms. Equity replaces security. Hustle stands in for trust. In a frictionless economy, moonlighting is less rebellion than logical overflow.

“Another perspective is how many founders are moonlighting,” says a Bengaluru-based founder of a deep tech startup, half-joking, half-weary. “We obsess over employee loyalty, but a lot of early-stage founders are still drawing salaries elsewhere, some at Big Tech jobs they haven’t quit yet.” It is a phenomenon rarely spoken of but quietly understood in investor circles. At demo days and accelerator pitch decks, some solo founders are still on the rolls of FAANG companies, working nights and weekends on their ‘real’ dream. Others stay embedded within larger startups until their side project raises enough to jump ship cleanly. None of this is illegal per se, but it mirrors the very duplicity companies claim to condemn.

The line, in other words, is blurry by design. A former CTO at an Indian health-tech unicorn recalls interviewing a promising founder only to discover that he was still collecting a salary from his old employer while fundraising for his own startup. “It’s common, especially when the startup is still in stealth,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘I’m leaving soon, just finalising ESOP paperwork’—but they’re already shipping product.” In such cases, the moral panic around moonlighting becomes less about ethics and more about power: who gets to multitask, and who gets called out for it.

In the end, Soham Parekh didn’t just moonlight. He exposed the frayed seams of an economy built on the fantasy of undivided attention. What he broke was the silent choreography of trust, ambition and feigned devotion that startups have come to depend on.

employmentjob cultureMoonlightingSoham Parekhwork ethics