Sergei Pavlov

Sergei Pavlov arrives at Amaya as a gifted young engineer chasing the ultimate promotion: a spot on Devs, the company's most secretive and prestigious team. Ambitious and quietly confident, he's dating fellow coder Lily Chan and clearly hungry to prove his brilliance to Forest, the company's enigmatic founder, whatever that might cost him.

Karl Glusman plays Sergei's early scenes with a controlled eagerness that reads as competence rather than nerves, which makes him instantly sympathetic in a world of opaque, watchful executives. Garland's script uses him as our entry point into Devs' rituals of secrecy and testing, so his hope and self-possession carry real dramatic weight before we understand what he's stepped into.