Sahami earned his Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 and PhD in 1999 from Stanford University[3] for research supervised by Daphne Koller.

[4] Sahami's research interests are in computer science education,[5][6] machine learning and information retrieval.

[9] His research interests include computer science education, artificial intelligence, and ethics.

He has also served as chair of the ACM Education Board, an elected member of the ACM Council, and was appointed by California Governor Jerry Brown to the state's Computer Science Strategic Implementation Plan Advisory Panel.

[10] In 2014, Sahami received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Presidential Award for "outstanding leadership of, and commitment to, the three-year ACM/IEEE-CS effort to produce CS2013, a comprehensive revision of the curricular guidelines for undergraduate programs in computer science".