John Heller and the work that comes after the deal

John Heller’s first Army job was keeping equipment working in West Germany. His later career would involve rather more lawyers, larger spreadsheets and an opening bell on Wall Street. Still, maintenance is a useful place to begin a story about him. Before an organization can do anything ambitious, somebody has to make its complicated parts work together.

Heller is now chief executive of Amentum, an engineering and technology business with approximately 50,000 employees in more than 70 countries. Its assignments span defense, intelligence, energy and space. Those are large words. His route into them includes a mathematics degree, an Army commission, a return to graduate school and a succession of companies being bought, sold, combined or taken public.

The resulting résumé has plenty of transaction dates. The more revealing question is what happens between them. A signed agreement can bring businesses under one name. Heller’s working life offers a close view of the slower business of getting people, customers and operations to move together.

First, keep the equipment running

He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point and served as a logistics officer. His first assignment was as a maintenance officer in what was then West Germany. Years later, he credited military service with giving him an appreciation for the missions of the customers he would eventually serve in business.

After the Army, he attended the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz business school full-time. He studied business strategy, earned his MBA and joined Deloitte Consulting. There is a pleasing contrast between his two fields of study: mathematics at West Point, followed by the rather less tidy problem of how organizations decide what to do.

His early civilian career lasted a decade in consulting before his first chief executive appointment, at Rentport, a portfolio company of the investment firm then known as Catterton Partners. Government services would become the principal setting for his subsequent career, but his first CEO title came through that commercial business.

“Don’t sit in your office. Get out in the field.”

John Heller, 2015

That advice to aspiring leaders is unusually concrete. Go where the project happens. Learn how services reach the customer. It is easy to picture executive development as a succession of meetings with increasingly senior people. Heller’s prescription sends the ambitious employee toward the work itself.

A career with several changes of letterhead

Netco, Multimax, Harris, Engility: the names mark a period of Heller’s career in which operational responsibility and corporate change kept arriving together. He ran Netco from 2004 to 2006, became president and chief operating officer of Multimax, and later held leadership roles at Harris, including president of Harris IT Services.

In 2012, he became senior vice president and chief operating officer of Engility after its separation from L-3 Communications. He then led PAE as president and CEO from 2013 to 2021. There, his responsibilities included growing the business and taking it into public markets.

PAE’s annual revenue expanded from $1.6 billion to $2.76 billion during his leadership. Revenue is a more useful description of those figures than company value: the numbers measure business activity, rather than what a buyer might pay. They give some scale to the operating experience Heller brought to his next assignment.

The chronology matters because Amentum’s own growth story had begun before he arrived. It emerged from AECOM’s Management Services business in 2020 and acquired DynCorp that year. Amentum completed its $1.9 billion cash acquisition of PAE in February 2022. Heller took over as Amentum CEO on March 28.

That put him in charge of a business containing his former employer, alongside operations with their own histories. The company name was comparatively young. Much of the experience inside it was considerably older.

Five priorities, then a much bigger combination

Heller’s early approach at Amentum was to give the organization a short list. In 2023, he described five priorities: growth, leadership, team building, synergies and enterprise transformation. The vocabulary belongs to corporate life, but the reason he gave was straightforward: help everyone understand what he intended to accomplish.

By then, the business had passed through a period of rapid expansion. He described it as “Amentum 2.0,” organized around engineering, science and technology; national security; and critical missions. His challenge was to give an enlarged organization a direction that employees could recognize in their own work.

The preparation was public well before the closing. At an August 2024 capital markets day at the New York Stock Exchange, Heller and the leadership team set out the proposed combination’s capabilities and financial outlook. Customers, investors and employees were being introduced to the shape of the organization they expected to build. For Heller, explaining the destination was already part of the job.

Then came another combination. In September 2024, Amentum completed its merger with Jacobs’ Critical Mission Solutions and Cyber and Intelligence businesses. Heller became CEO and a director of the combined company. Steve Demetriou became executive chair; Steve Arnette, chief operating officer; Travis Johnson, chief financial officer; and Jill Bruning, chief technology officer.

Regular-way trading began on September 30 under AMTM. The opening-bell ceremony followed the next day. It made an unusually photogenic punctuation mark for a career spent among operating businesses. A bell gives everyone permission to applaud at once; integration tends to require rather more coordination.

The homework after the photograph

By October 2026, Amentum was marking two years as a public company. Its retrospective included a less theatrical number than a listing price: more than 24,000 employees had participated in its first global engagement survey. For a company assembled from several established businesses, that is a substantial exercise in asking the people inside it what they think.

The same anniversary brought another marker. Amentum had entered the Fortune 500 at number 313. Its stated priorities included global nuclear energy, space systems and critical digital infrastructure. The combination had created a broader platform; those choices indicated where management wanted to direct it.

Recognition followed the expanded responsibilities. In 2026, Heller received his tenth Wash100 award, an annual government contracting industry recognition. Earlier, he had received CEO awards from WashingtonExec and the Association for Corporate Growth. The awards supply dates and trophies; the career behind them includes a long sequence of operating appointments, each with a different collection of people and inherited commitments.

Heller also acquired an industry responsibility outside his own company. In January 2026, he became board chair of the Professional Services Council, the trade association representing federal contractors. A CEO already deals with customers, employees, investors and partners. The council role adds the concerns of an industry whose fortunes are closely connected to government decisions.

The first full public-company year also gave the strategy a reporting period of its own. When Amentum announced fiscal 2025 results in November that year, Heller pointed to nuclear energy, digital infrastructure and space technology as areas for future growth. Those priorities carried into the following year, giving some continuity to a company whose recent history contained so much change.

The public-company calendar supplies its own discipline. In August 2026, Amentum reported $3.5 billion in quarterly revenue and a $48.2 billion backlog. Heller acknowledged pressures on the revenue outlook while discussing stronger profitability expectations. That pairing belongs in the story alongside the celebrations: a larger business still has to explain its performance, quarter by quarter.

The next assignment has a Tennessee address

On October 8, 2026, Heller joined the ribbon-cutting for Amentum’s Global Nuclear headquarters in Oak Ridge. The facility houses its Nuclear Center of Excellence and more than 150 specialists. Nuclear energy, one of the company’s declared growth markets, now had a centralized operating home.

The opening came with a training commitment: $500,000 over five years for curriculum and scholarships through Roane State Community College and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. For a business built on technical expertise, a future workforce is part of the operating problem. Buildings require people who know what to do inside them.

Another address was on the horizon. Earlier in 2026, Amentum announced plans for a new worldwide headquarters in Reston, Virginia, opening in early 2027. Heller is based in Reston; the company’s announced move from Chantilly remained a future event. Even a global organization occasionally has to organize the moving boxes.

Pittsburgh, with room for a little provocation

Heller’s connection to Pittsburgh has lasted longer than any of those corporate addresses. He grew up there, returned for business school, and serves on the university’s Chancellor’s Global Advisory Council and the Pitt Business Board of Visitors. His attachment also makes an appearance when the conversation turns away from business.

In a public conversation with Amentum strategy executive Adam Harrison, Heller teased his colleague about Penn State and its mascot before expressing his affection for Pittsburgh. The exchange had the familiar texture of colleagues who have found a reliable subject on which to disagree. Corporate integration, apparently, need not extend to college loyalties.

His reading offers another small window. He has identified Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations as influential books. He said he kept returning to the latter. A Roman emperor and a value investor make an interesting pair of advisers: neither is likely to be impressed by a busy presentation.

Across the career, Heller’s practical advice remains consistent: learn different parts of an organization and take responsibility for your own development. His responsibilities have expanded dramatically since that first maintenance assignment. The questions still have a recognizable shape. Who understands the work? What do they need? How do all the pieces come together tomorrow?