He also led the Knowledge Platform team at Apple Inc. Ihab is the holder of the Thomson Reuters-NSERC Industrial Research Chair in Data Cleaning at the University of Waterloo.

[1][2][3] Ilyas co-founded Tamr Inc., a start-up focusing on large-scale data integration and cleaning, with Andy Palmer and Michael Stonebraker, a Turing Award winner.

After his doctoral studies, Ilyas accepted a position in 2004 as a tenure-track professor at the University of Waterloo's David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science.

He and his research group introduced novel practical algorithms and system prototypes, which circumvent limitations of previous data-cleaning solutions that either focus narrowly on single types of data errors or ignore real-life considerations that prevent their adoption.

With Theodoros Rekatsinas, Christopher Ré, and Xu Chu, he introduced HoloClean,[7] an open-source statistical inference engine to impute, clean and enrich data.