He is currently the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Francisco.

Since April 2015, Butte has serves as inaugural director of UCSF's Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute.

In April 2012, Butte delivered a TEDMED talk describing his lab's development of techniques using massive amount of publicly available biomedical research data to make new discoveries without running a wet-lab and actually outsourcing experiments using assaydepot.com.

Butte lives with his wife, Gini Deshpande, a cancer biology and biotechnology entrepreneur, and daughter in Menlo Park, CA.

[12][13] As of 2018[update], Deshpande was the chief executive officer of NuMedii, an artificial intelligence technology company.