In 1986, Bostic joined the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley.

[2] Among many other tasks, he led the effort at CSRG to create a free software version of BSD Unix, which helped allow the creation of FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

Bostic was a founder of Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi),[2] which produced BSD/OS, a proprietary version of BSD.

Bostic and his wife Margo Seltzer founded Sleepycat Software in 1996 to develop and commercialize Berkeley DB, an open-source, key-value database.

Bostic and Michael Cahill founded WiredTiger in 2010 to create a NoSQL database management system.