Guerraoui earned simultaneous Master’s degrees in Computer Engineering from the École supérieure d'informatique électronique automatique (ESIEA) and in Computer Science from the Pierre and Marie Curie University in 1989, supported by a scholarship at the Centre de Recherche of the École des Mines of Paris.
[6] He then started as a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL and was appointed to the computer science faculty in 1999, after stints at HP Labs and MIT.
[11][10] With various collaborators, Guerraoui has written several technical and general-audience books: He is also an associate (area) editor of the Journal of the ACM.
[17] Guerraoui maintains strong ties to Morocco through his participation in the public debate and the Moroccan political life.
His paper on lightweight epidemic broadcast[24] was the first to consider the partial and/or out-of-sync views of different processes in a gossip-based distributed system.
[33] Guerraoui invented the mathematical abstraction of indulgence[34] to precisely capture the essence of asynchronous algorithms of which safety does not depend on timing assumptions, such as Lamport's Paxos or Castro-Liskov's PBFT.