Leidos

Leidos got its start in 1969 as Science Applications Incorporated, a La Jolla think-tank-turned-contractor founded by physicist J. Robert Beyster on the idea that scientists, not just program managers, should run a services company. SAIC grew for decades as an employee-owned business before splitting itself into two public companies in 2013, spinning off its larger government services arm and renaming it Leidos while keeping the SAIC name for the smaller entity that remained. Leidos now trades on the NYSE as LDOS and is headquartered in Reston, Virginia. Its Defense Solutions segment is the biggest and the one that carries most of the company's engineering reputation.

It runs large IT and network modernization contracts for the Pentagon and intelligence agencies, builds explosives and threat detection equipment, the Reveal line of CT scanners now used in airports worldwide, inherited in part from an L3Harris security detection acquisition in 2020, and does systems integration work across sensors, command and control, and cyber. Two acquisitions reshaped this segment over the past several years: Dynetics, bought in 2020 for 1.65 billion dollars, brought hardware engineering and rapid prototyping into a company that had mostly sold services, including work on the X-61A Gremlins swarming drone recovery program for DARPA, the GBU-69 small glide munition, and hypersonics research. Gibbs & Cox, acquired in 2021, is the country's largest independent naval architecture and marine engineering firm, giving Leidos design authority on Navy ship programs it previously could only support from the IT side. The Civil segment covers a wide mix of federal customer work outside defense, including air traffic modernization support for the FAA, systems for the Department of Homeland Security, and logistics and operations support for the US Antarctic Program, where Leidos has run facilities and science support under contract for years.

The Health segment builds and operates health IT systems and manages federal medical and research programs, most notably continuing to run the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research on behalf of the National Cancer Institute, a role Leidos has held since the SAIC days. Leidos has also pushed further into products rather than pure services over the past five years, something the Dynetics deal in particular was meant to accelerate, positioning the company to compete for hardware and prototyping work it previously would have left to traditional manufacturers. With about 47,000 employees and roughly 15 billion dollars in annual revenue, Leidos sits among the largest US government services contractors, distinguished from pure IT integrators by how much hardware engineering, from ship design to detection systems to experimental drones, now sits inside a company that started as a research consultancy.