Key Takeaways
- Drägerwerk is a 135-year-old Lübeck-headquartered, family-controlled medical and safety technology company with roughly 16,000 employees, listed as DRW8 on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
- The AG & Co. KGaA legal structure lets the Dräger family, now in its 5th generation under CEO Stefan Dräger, run the company on a multi-decade horizon rather than a quarterly one.
- The business operates on two pillars: Medical (anesthesia, patient monitoring, ventilation, neonatal care) and Safety (SCBA, gas detection, Alcotest and DrugTest). Both are heavily regulated and mission-critical.
- The 2020-2022 COVID-19 ventilator surge was historically unprecedented; 2023-2025 has been a deliberate normalization, and current hiring happens against that post-pandemic reset, not a growth story.
- Lübeck is a small Hanseatic city on the Baltic, and the company culture is inseparable from it: long tenure, engineering-led, institutional memory, patient decision-making, and a genuine works council presence.
- German is effectively required for most Germany-based roles at B2 or higher; English is sufficient for global and international roles. Ausbildung credentials (Mechatroniker, Elektroniker, Meister) are genuinely valued.
- Resumes should foreground specific standards (MDR, IEC 60601, ISO 13485, ISO 14971, ATEX, NFPA) and quantify restrained, accurate impact rather than marketing-style claims.
- Interviews reward craft, durability, and long-term thinking. Candidates who frame everything around speed, disruption, or short-term metrics read as cultural mismatches.
- The most common reason offers get declined is not money — it is Philips, GE HealthCare, and Siemens Healthineers pulling candidates into Amsterdam, Chicago, or Erlangen with bigger brands, bigger cities, and broader product portfolios.
About Dräger
Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA is a German family-controlled medical and safety technology company founded in 1889 in Lübeck by Heinrich Dräger, and it has operated continuously from that Hanseatic port city on Germany's Baltic coast for more than 135 years. Listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange under the ticker DRW8, the company is today one of the oldest surviving privately influenced industrial firms in Germany, with roughly 16,000 employees across more than 50 countries and a manufacturing and R&D footprint anchored in Lübeck. The legal form — AG & Co. KGaA — is not a trivial detail: it is a partnership limited by shares that allows the founding Dräger family, through a general partner vehicle, to retain strategic control of the business even while common shares trade publicly. That structure is the reason Stefan Dräger, the 5th-generation family member and current Chairman of the Executive Board, can run the company on a multi-decade horizon rather than a quarterly one. It is also the reason analysts complain about Drägerwerk's 'family discount' in the share price — and the reason long-tenured employees treat it as a feature, not a bug. Drägerwerk operates on two pillars that share technology but serve different customers. The Medical division builds anesthesia workstations, ICU and neonatal patient monitors, ventilators, and hospital ceiling supply units — the kind of capital equipment that sits next to a patient for 15 to 20 years and must never, under any circumstance, fail silently. The Safety division builds self-contained breathing apparatus (SCBA) worn by firefighters worldwide, stationary and portable gas detection systems for oil, gas, chemical and mining sites, and alcohol and drug screening devices — the Alcotest and DrugTest product families used by police forces and employers in dozens of countries. Roughly 60% of revenue comes from Medical and 40% from Safety in a typical year, and both pillars are deeply regulated: MDR and FDA on the medical side, ATEX, IECEx, NFPA and a long tail of national standards on the safety side. The 2020-2022 period was unlike anything in the company's history. Demand for ventilators exploded during COVID-19; the German federal government placed an emergency order for 10,000 ventilators in March 2020, and Drägerwerk scaled production dramatically. The years since have been a controlled normalization: the ventilator stockpile is built, hospital capex budgets are tighter, and 2024 and 2025 have been about returning to the steady, slow-compounding medical and safety cadence the company ran on before the pandemic. Candidates should understand that the current era at Dräger is a deliberate reset — not a crisis, but not the pandemic-era growth story either. The culture reflects all of this: engineering-led, conservative in the best sense, patient with people who take the time to learn the domain, and genuinely proud of being a Lübeck company rather than a Munich or Frankfurt one.
Application Process
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1
Search roles at the official careers portal https://www
Search roles at the official careers portal https://www.draeger.com/en_corp/Careers and filter by location (Lübeck is the largest site, followed by international subsidiaries). The portal is the canonical source — recruiter postings on LinkedIn should always be cross-referenced against it before applying.
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2
Drägerwerk uses SAP SuccessFactors as its applicant tracking system; you will cr
Drägerwerk uses SAP SuccessFactors as its applicant tracking system; you will create a candidate profile, upload your CV and cover letter (Anschreiben), and answer a short set of structured questions. Expect to use the same login across multiple applications.
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3
For roles based in Lübeck or other German sites, prepare a German-style applicat
For roles based in Lübeck or other German sites, prepare a German-style application: tabular CV (tabellarischer Lebenslauf), a one-page cover letter addressed to the hiring department, and scanned copies of your degree certificates (Zeugnisse) and relevant Arbeitszeugnisse from prior employers. International hires for global roles can usually apply in English, but German documents strengthen any Germany-based application.
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4
Initial screening is handled by HR (Personalabteilung) and typically takes two t
Initial screening is handled by HR (Personalabteilung) and typically takes two to four weeks. A phone or Teams screen of 20-30 minutes covers motivation, language skills, notice period, and salary expectations. Be prepared to quote a specific gross annual figure (Bruttojahresgehalt) rather than a range.
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5
Technical rounds follow with the hiring manager and one or two senior engineers
Technical rounds follow with the hiring manager and one or two senior engineers or specialists. For R&D, quality, regulatory, and clinical roles, expect detailed questions about IEC 60601, ISO 13485, MDR, risk management (ISO 14971), and domain-specific standards. For Safety division roles, ATEX, IECEx, and NFPA familiarity is a strong signal.
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A final round is usually held on-site in Lübeck (or the relevant site) and inclu
A final round is usually held on-site in Lübeck (or the relevant site) and includes a panel with the department head, a works council (Betriebsrat) representative for many roles, and often a peer. Reimbursement of travel costs is standard practice; ask HR to confirm the policy before booking.
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Offers are issued as a formal written contract (Arbeitsvertrag) in German for Ge
Offers are issued as a formal written contract (Arbeitsvertrag) in German for German sites, typically with a six-month probation period (Probezeit). Expect two to three weeks between final interview and written offer; negotiation is acceptable but restrained — big counter-offer theatrics do not play well here.
Resume Tips for Dräger
recommended
Write your CV in German if you are applying to a Lübeck-based or other Germany-b
Write your CV in German if you are applying to a Lübeck-based or other Germany-based role. A tabular Lebenslauf with reverse-chronological experience, dates in MM/YYYY format, and a professional photo (still standard in Germany, though no longer required by law) signals cultural fit. Keep it to two pages maximum.
recommended
Write an English CV for global roles, international subsidiary roles, and any po
Write an English CV for global roles, international subsidiary roles, and any position tagged 'global' or 'international' in the posting. Use a clean, conservative layout — this is not a place for infographic resumes or colored sidebars.
recommended
For medical device engineering roles, explicitly list the standards you have wor
For medical device engineering roles, explicitly list the standards you have worked under: IEC 60601-1 and its collaterals, IEC 62304 for software, ISO 13485 for quality, ISO 14971 for risk management, and MDR (EU 2017/745) or FDA 21 CFR Part 820. Recruiters at Dräger read for these acronyms first.
recommended
For Safety division roles (SCBA, gas detection, Alcotest), foreground ATEX direc
For Safety division roles (SCBA, gas detection, Alcotest), foreground ATEX directive 2014/34/EU, IECEx, NFPA 1981/1982 for breathing apparatus, and metrology standards. If you have worked with intrinsically safe electronics, say so explicitly.
recommended
Call out any Ausbildung (vocational training) or Meister qualifications if you h
Call out any Ausbildung (vocational training) or Meister qualifications if you have them. Drägerwerk is a serious participant in the German dual education system and hires technicians, electronics specialists (Elektroniker für Geräte und Systeme), and mechatronics engineers (Mechatroniker) through it. These credentials carry real weight and should never be hidden behind English translations.
recommended
Add a Sprachkenntnisse (language skills) block with CEFR levels (A2, B1, B2, C1,
Add a Sprachkenntnisse (language skills) block with CEFR levels (A2, B1, B2, C1, C2). For Germany-based roles, B2 German is the realistic floor for most non-R&D positions, and C1 is expected for customer-facing, regulatory, or management roles. English B2+ is expected across the board.
recommended
Quantify with restraint
Quantify with restraint. German engineering culture rewards accuracy over marketing. 'Reduced assembly time by approximately 18% over two product generations' is better than 'Drove massive efficiency gains.' Hiring managers at Dräger will trust the former and distrust the latter.
recommended
Include a short section on relevant hardware, firmware, or clinical environments
Include a short section on relevant hardware, firmware, or clinical environments you have worked in — hospital ICU, operating room, fire service, mining, petrochemical. Dräger hires for domain fluency, and showing you have been inside the environment your product serves is often the deciding signal.
ATS System: SAP SuccessFactors
Interview Culture
Interviewing at Drägerwerk feels different from interviewing at a Munich automotive supplier or a Berlin SaaS startup, and candidates who misread the cultural signal often lose offers they should have won. The first thing to understand is Lübeck itself. Lübeck is a Hanseatic League city of about 220,000 people on the Baltic coast, the former 'Queen of the Hanse,' and the company's identity is inseparable from it. The Dräger family has lived and built here since 1889. The main campus in the Moislinger Allee area is walking distance from the old town, employees live in surrounding neighborhoods, and everyone in Lübeck seems to know someone who works at Dräger. This is not a place where people commute in from three different metros. It is a small-city engineering culture with institutional memory measured in decades, and interviewers are evaluating whether you would fit into that setting for the long haul. The second thing to understand is the family-business long-termism. Because the KGaA structure lets Stefan Dräger and the family general partner run the company on a generational horizon, the questions you get will often reach further than you expect. Interviewers will probe how you think about durability, about getting things right rather than fast, about working with the same team and same product platform for five or ten years. Candidates who frame every answer around 'speed,' 'disruption,' or 'moving fast and breaking things' read as cultural mismatches. Candidates who talk about craft, standards, patient safety, and the responsibility that comes with a 20-year product life cycle read as native speakers. The third thing is medical device rigor. In R&D, quality, regulatory, clinical, and manufacturing interviews, you will be asked in detail about how you handle edge cases, how you document decisions, how you trace requirements to tests, and how you would respond to a field safety notice. There are right and wrong answers to these questions, and the right answers sound like ISO 13485 and ISO 14971 internalized as habits, not recited as buzzwords. The fourth thing is the post-COVID reset. Do not walk into an interview celebrating the pandemic-era ventilator surge as the company's golden age. Interviewers have lived through the normalization and are focused on the next chapter — cost discipline, platform consolidation, growth in Safety, expansion in emerging markets, and the generational technology refresh on the medical side. Show that you understand the company is in a measured, deliberate phase and that you want to contribute to that, not to a growth story that has already peaked. Finally, expect punctuality, formality, and a works council presence in many final-round panels. Address people as Frau or Herr plus surname until explicitly invited to use first names. Bring printed copies of your CV and certificates. Arrive ten minutes early. This is not quaint — it is the culture, and it is the culture that has kept the company going since 1889.
What Dräger Looks For
- Deep domain fluency in one of the company's regulated environments — hospital critical care, anesthesia, fire services, industrial gas detection, or forensic testing. Generalists without domain weight struggle to differentiate themselves from internal candidates.
- Fluency with the relevant standards framework. MDR, IEC 60601, ISO 13485, ISO 14971 for medical roles; ATEX, IECEx, NFPA, OIML for safety roles. Candidates who can speak to specific clauses credibly are treated very differently from those who cannot.
- Strong written and spoken German for Germany-based roles (B2 minimum for most, C1 for customer-facing, regulatory, or leadership positions). Strong English across the company for documentation and cross-site collaboration.
- Evidence of long tenure and patience with complex systems. Dräger is wary of candidates whose resumes show a pattern of 12- to 18-month stops, because the products here require multi-year investment to master.
- Quality-first mindset with documented, traceable work habits. Design history files, risk management files, and change controls are daily life. Candidates who treat documentation as an afterthought do not last.
- Alignment with a family-business, long-termist culture. This means comfort with slower decision cycles, consensus-oriented meetings, and a Betriebsrat (works council) that is genuinely involved in significant HR and process decisions.
- Willingness to relocate to Lübeck (or commit to a significant presence there). The core engineering and product organizations are not remote-first, and hybrid is typically two to three days on-site for Germany-based roles.
- Genuine interest in the mission: keeping patients alive under anesthesia, getting firefighters home to their families, detecting the gas leak before anyone is hurt. This is a company where mission language is not marketing.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the typical salary range for engineers at Drägerwerk in Germany?
For Germany-based roles, entry-level engineers (Berufseinsteiger) with a Bachelor's or Master's typically land in the €45,000 to €58,000 gross annual range. Engineers with three to seven years of experience commonly sit between €60,000 and €78,000. Senior engineers, regulatory specialists, and technical leads in the eight-to-fifteen-year range often earn €80,000 to €95,000 and sometimes higher for scarce specializations like MDR regulatory affairs or embedded software for Class IIb devices. Actual figures depend on collective bargaining agreement (Tarifvertrag) coverage, role, and location, so treat these as directional rather than contractual.
Is relocation to Lübeck practical, and what should I expect living there?
Lübeck is a Hanseatic city of about 220,000 people on Germany's Baltic coast, roughly 65 kilometers northeast of Hamburg by autobahn or regional train. Rents and housing costs are meaningfully lower than Munich, Frankfurt, or Hamburg, the old town is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the Baltic beaches at Travemünde are a 20-minute drive. Winters are long, dark, and wet; summers are short but pleasant. International candidates should expect fewer English-only services than a major metro, a slower restaurant and retail scene, and a strong sense of local identity. Many employees live in Lübeck itself; others commute from Hamburg.
Do I need to speak German to work at Drägerwerk?
For Germany-based roles in R&D, manufacturing, quality, regulatory, commercial, and HR, German at B2 or higher is effectively required. Meetings, documentation, standards work, and works council interactions all happen primarily in German. For global functions — some product management, international service, export controls, international sales, and IT infrastructure — English is sufficient, and the company operates comfortably in English for cross-site collaboration. If you are not at B2 yet but serious about the role, starting intensive German while you interview is a credible signal.
Why do offers from Drägerwerk sometimes get turned down for Philips, GE HealthCare, or Siemens Healthineers?
The three most common reasons are brand, geography, and scope. Philips pulls medical device talent toward Amsterdam and Eindhoven with a larger consumer-health halo; GE HealthCare offers a global US-listed employer and larger Chicago and Waukesha-area roles; Siemens Healthineers in Erlangen and Forchheim has imaging scale and a flashier growth story. What Drägerwerk offers in return is genuine: deeper domain focus in anesthesia, ICU, and safety; longer tenure; a family-controlled long-term horizon; and real ownership over meaningful products. Candidates who value those specific things pick Dräger; candidates optimizing for brand, metro size, or short-term compensation often do not.
How does the AG & Co. KGaA structure actually affect my day-to-day as an employee?
The KGaA structure means the Dräger family, via a general partner vehicle, controls strategic direction even though the company is publicly listed. In practice this shows up as longer decision horizons, more patience with multi-year platform investments, and less quarter-by-quarter pressure on engineering and product teams than you would find at a standard AG. It also means you will hear Stefan Dräger's name in strategy conversations and occasionally encounter him in Lübeck-based events. For most employees, the structure is invisible day-to-day; it matters most when a long, expensive program needs to survive a weak quarter.
What is the work-life balance like, and what about remote work?
The standard week is 35 to 40 hours depending on the collective bargaining agreement that applies to your role, with 30 vacation days typical and strong public holiday coverage in Schleswig-Holstein. Overtime exists, especially around regulatory submissions and audit cycles, but is not normalized. Hybrid work is common for office roles at roughly two to three days on-site, with manufacturing, service, and clinical roles on-site by necessity. Fully remote work is rare and usually limited to specific specialist or international roles. The culture genuinely supports taking vacation and parental leave; it is not a performative benefit.
What does the post-COVID normalization mean for job seekers right now?
During 2020 to 2022, the Medical division scaled dramatically to meet ventilator and critical-care monitoring demand, and hiring was aggressive. 2023 through 2025 has been a controlled normalization: hospital capital budgets are tighter, the ventilator stockpile is built, and growth has shifted back to the pre-pandemic pace. For candidates this means hiring is more selective, backfills are scrutinized, and headcount growth is targeted at specific strategic areas rather than broad. It does not mean the company is shrinking. It means the 2020-2022 era is not the baseline, and you should benchmark against the long pre-COVID cadence.
What's the interview process like in terms of length and format?
Expect four to eight weeks from application to offer. An HR phone screen of 20 to 30 minutes covers motivation, language, notice period, and salary. One or two technical rounds follow with the hiring manager and senior peers, typically on Teams, each lasting 60 to 90 minutes. A final on-site panel in Lübeck or the relevant site is standard for professional and senior roles and often includes a department head and a works council representative. Travel costs to final-round interviews are typically reimbursed. Offers arrive as a formal written German-language contract for Germany-based roles within two to three weeks of the final round.
How important is prior medical device or safety industry experience?
Very important for most engineering, quality, regulatory, and clinical roles. Drägerwerk hires heavily for domain fluency because the products sit inside regulated environments — operating rooms, ICUs, fire services, petrochemical plants — where mistakes have direct human consequences. Candidates coming from automotive, general industrial, or consumer electronics can absolutely cross over, but they should foreground any regulated-industry experience (functional safety, ISO 26262, aerospace DO-178C, pharma GxP) and be ready to articulate how they will learn the medical device or ATEX framework specifically. Pure web or consumer software backgrounds are a harder sell outside IT infrastructure roles.
Is Drägerwerk a good fit for early-career candidates and Ausbildung graduates?
Yes, deliberately so. The company runs a serious Ausbildung program in Lübeck for mechatronics, industrial electronics, IT specialists, and several other trades, and dual-study (duales Studium) paths combining an engineering Bachelor's with practical training are well established. Graduates from these programs are often hired into permanent roles and go on to long careers. For university early-career candidates, Drägerwerk offers structured entry programs, working-student (Werkstudent) positions, and thesis partnerships. The company treats early-career investment as a generational obligation rather than a nice-to-have, which is itself a hallmark of the family-business culture.
Open Positions
Dräger currently has 36 open positions.
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Sources
- Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA — Official Careers Portal — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA — Company Overview and History — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA — Investor Relations — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA — Annual Report Archive — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- DRW8 — Frankfurt Stock Exchange Listing — Deutsche Börse / Frankfurter Wertpapierbörse
- Drägerwerk Careers — Ausbildung and Dual Study Programs — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- Drägerwerk — Lübeck Headquarters and Production Site — Drägerwerk AG & Co. KGaA
- Hansestadt Lübeck — Official City Portal — Hansestadt Lübeck
