Engineer sues HubSpot, says parental leave triggered PIP and firing

Turnbull-Reilly joined HubSpot as an Engineering Lead in June 2024 at a base salary of $245,000, with total compensation of about $395,000 including stock. According to the complaint, he told Khanna early on that his wife was pregnant. The role, he says, was framed as a management job. The filing points to a September 9, 2024 Slack message from Khanna setting “Global Home planning and execution” as Priority Zero and describing coding as work that “run in parallel always” and could be delegated. 

His son was born in late November 2024. He took parental leave under HubSpot’s company policy. 

According to the filing, the trouble started after he returned in February 2025. Within twelve days, the complaint says, Khanna rolled out a new “Engineering Values” framework telling people in his role they were “engineers first, managers second” – a reversal, the complaint argues, of what had been agreed in writing seven months earlier. 

The gender stereotyping claim turns on a single line. Turnbull-Reilly says he told Khanna he was sleep-deprived from caring for his newborn. According to the complaint, Khanna asked: “What does your wife do?” Turnbull-Reilly says he read the question as a sex-based assumption that overnight infant care belonged to his wife. 

A few weeks later, his performance assessment flipped. His February 25 six-month review was a 3 out of 5 – what Khanna reportedly called the rating “the vast majority of employees receive” – and came with a 6% raise. On March 11, 2025, after Turnbull-Reilly confirmed his remaining parental leave dates for August and early September, the complaint says, Khanna told him he was “absolutely not meeting expectations” on code output. The filing argues the “almost a year” timeframe Khanna used for the review mathematically included the leave period.