In 1968, Habermann was invited to join the department of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University as a visiting research scientist.
In 1969 he was appointed an associate professor, and was made full professor in 1974, acting department head in 1979,[4] and department head from 1980 to 1988, after which he was named Dean of the new School of Computer Science (established under Allen Newell and Herbert A. Simon).
He also cofounded Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in 1985.
He was known for his work on inter-process communication, process synchronization and deadlock avoidance, and software verification, but particularly for the programming languages ALGOL 60, BLISS, Pascal, and Ada.
Habermann served as visiting professor at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (1973) and Technische Universität Berlin (1976), and as adjunct professor at Shanghai Jiao Tong University (1986–1993).