Brandić was born in Gradačac, Bosnia and Herzegovina, then part of Yugoslavia.
She came to Austria as a secondary school student in 1992, not knowing any German, as a refugee from the Bosnian War.
[2] She earned a master's degree in business computer science in 2002 from the University of Vienna, and a doctorate in the same subject in 2007 from TU Wien.
She completed her habilitation in applied computer science at TU Wien in 2013.
[1] She was an untenured assistant professor in the Institute for Scientific Computing at the University of Vienna from 2002 to 2007, and in the faculty for informatics of TU Wien from 2007 to 2014, with a year on leave as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Melbourne in 2008.