He served as head of Moldova's Superior Magistrate Council and was elected President by parliament on 16 March 2012.

On 6 July 1949, his paternal grandfather Tudor Timofti was deported by Soviet authorities to the Amur region, where he died in 1953.

After graduation, Timofti spent two years in the Soviet Army before beginning his career as a judge in 1976, when he worked as a consultant at the Ministry of Justice of the Moldavian SSR.

In April 2013, it was found out, that he was the judge who in January 1987 found the pro-Romanian dissident Gheorghe David guilty of "systematic propaganda, in writing and orally, of ideas of a nationalist character, aiming to provoke national enmity towards persons of Russian nationality, to discredit the national Leninist policy of the CPSU", In an open letter published on 16 April of that year, Timofti said "that he regrets that he was put in a situation to apply an inhumane law and explained that, as a judge, he was obliged to apply the law.

[5] In 2005, Timofti was appointed to the Higher Judicial Chamber and, in 2011, he was named chairman of the Supreme Council of Magistrates.