[13] Stoica was born in Romania, where he grew up and attended Polytechnic University of Bucharest, receiving a MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in 1989.

[17] In 1996, he transferred to Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), where in 2000 he received a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering supervised by Hui Zhang.

[3][18] Subjects included Chord (peer-to-peer), Core-Stateless Fair Queueing (CSFQ), and Internet Indirection Infrastructure (i3).

[2][21][22][23] Stoica was a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Conviva in 2006,[24] a company that came out of the End System Multicast project at CMU.

Stoica under the supervision of his doctoral advisor Hui Zhang won the Association for Computing Machinery Ph.D. dissertation Award in 2001 for his thesis Stateless Core: A Scalable Approach for Quality of Service in the Internet (2000).