PriviCe Corporation

Clare Shevchenko

Chief Engineer — San Francisco, CA

Born and raised in Hastings on the south coast of England, Clare Shevchenko discovered the world of computers at the age of nine when she found a water-damaged Sinclair Spectrum in a market stall and spent the summer bringing it back to life. There was no school she attended, no university that shaped her trajectory. Clare taught herself everything.

By fourteen she had written a working assembler. By seventeen she had patched a documented kernel bug and quietly submitted the fix to a mailing list where engineers twice her age argued about whether the author existed. She did not introduce herself.

She spent her twenties moving between research groups and early internet infrastructure projects across the UK and later the United States, never staying long enough to collect a title but always leaving the systems in markedly better shape. Her reputation preceded her introduction at every door.

“You do not need permission to understand a thing completely. You need patience and a willingness to be wrong every day until you are not.”

Clare joined PriviCe in the company’s first year when Stephen Harrow, newly appointed CTO, tracked down a short white paper she had self-published on fault propagation in distributed state machines. The paper had no author contact details. Stephen found her through four degrees of mailing-list forwarding.

As Chief Engineer she has designed the core delivery standards that sit underneath every PriviCe client engagement, from initial architecture reviews through long-term operational handover. Her method is disciplined, precise, and somewhat alarming to those encountering it for the first time.

Outside engineering she thinks seriously about metaphysics, writes occasionally on C’s memory model as an exercise in philosophy, and has been known to hold extremely long conversations about the nature of time and whether free will is a coherent concept. She prefers email.

Clare can be reached at clare@privice.com for discussions on life, C, or metaphysics.