Waters attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where he graduated in 2000 with a BS in computer science.
He earned a PhD in computer science from Princeton University in 2004.
In 2008, he joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he currently holds the title of Professor in the Department of Computer Science.
[1] In July 2019, he joined NTT Research to work in their Cryptography and Information Security (CIS) Laboratory.
[6] In 2019, he was named a Simons Investigator in theoretical computer science.