Alexey Leonidovich Pajitnov is a Russian computer engineer, currently residing in the United States. Pajitnov developed the popular game Tetris while working for the Dorodnitsyn Computing Centre of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a Soviet government-founded R&D center.

Despite being the developer of Tetris, Pajitnov did not receive royalties from his creation, as rights were owned by his employer, the Soviet government, which distributed it throughout the USSR and Eastern Europe. He only started to get royalties from his creation in 1996 when he and Henk Rogers formed The Tetris Company.