He is currently a Distinguished Professor (Emeritus) of Computer Science in the Donald Bren School at the University of California, Irvine and a Consulting Architect at Couchbase, Inc..[2] Carey earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1983.

From 1983 to 1995, Carey taught in the Computer Sciences Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[5] Carey was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2002 for contributions to the design, implementation, and evaluation of database systems.

He joined the faculty of the University of California, Irvine in 2008 as a Donald Bren Professor of Computer and Information Sciences.

[3] Since 2015 Carey has served as a Consulting Chief Architect at Couchbase, Inc.[6] Carey has published over 200 research papers, journal articles, book chapters and other publications that primarily focus on Big Data management, database management systems, information integration, middleware, parallel and distributed systems, and computer system performance evaluation.