After teaching for almost a decade at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, Roberto became a Computer Science full professor at University Paris Diderot in 1999. He is currently on leave at Inria as director of the Software Heritage project.

He has been actively involved in research in theoretical computing, specifically in functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic. His main focus is now on the new scientific problems posed by the general adoption of Free Software, with a particular focus on static analysis of large software collections, that were at the core of the european reseach project Mancoosi.

Following the evolution of our society under the impact of IT with great interest, he is a long term Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and software. He created the Free Software thematic group of Systematic in October 2007, that fostered the emergence of over 60 open source research and development projects over the past ten years.

In 2015, he founded and now directs Software Heritage, an initiative to build the universal archive of all the source code publicly available.