Stata received his bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science and Engineering from MIT, where he also earned his Ph.D. in 1996, under adviser John Guttag.

[2] After finishing his Ph.D., Stata worked for Digital Equipment Corporation's Systems Research Center, where he contributed to the AltaVista search engine.

[3] He was an assistant professor of Computer Science at the Baskin School of Engineering at UC Santa Cruz, and collaborated with the Internet Archive.

[13] Stata was also involved early in Apache Hadoop, consulting with and eventually hiring its founders Doug Cutting and Mike Cafarella at Yahoo!.

[21] Since 2018, Stata was product and technology advisor for Aqfer, an enterprise software company developing data marketing tools.