Fulda, June 3, 2026 – The EDAG Group, a leading global independent engineering service provider with experts in mobility, defense, industry, and public solutions, is strengthening its management team: Thomas Mailänder is taking on the newly created role of Vice President of Defense. In this role, EDAG is consolidating its activities in the defense sector, thereby emphasizing the strategic importance of this market for the company. In his role at EDAG, Thomas Mailänder is responsible for the strategic and operational development of the company in the defense sector.
Thomas Mailänder – Decades of Leadership Experience in Automotive and Defense
Thomas Mailänder has decades of leadership and organizational development experience in the automotive and defense industries. Throughout his career, he has held senior positions at companies including Daimler-Benz, Rheinmetall, and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann, and has served as CEO of several international companies. His areas of focus include developing new markets, managing complex programs, and advancing organizations and business segments.
“Defense has been a strategically important business segment and a relevant growth market for EDAG for 20 years. Thomas Mailänder brings experience in leading national and international programs and in strategically developing organizations. In his role, he will apply his long-standing automotive and industrial expertise to safety-critical applications in the defense sector and drive them forward,” says Harald Keller, CEO of the EDAG Group.
“EDAG stands for engineering expertise and a consistent end-to-end approach. It is precisely this strength that is becoming increasingly important in the defense environment. While we experience very short, cost-driven development cycles in the automotive sector, in the defense industry we are talking about mission-oriented systems with lifecycles spanning several decades. At the same time, the current security policy landscape has drastically changed the requirements for speed and time-to-market. The industry is looking for ways to significantly shorten development times—and this is precisely where the EDAG Group can make a decisive contribution with its interdisciplinary engineering expertise and holistic development approach,” says Thomas Mailänder, Vice President Defense at the EDAG Group.
