He earned his PhD at MIT in 1988 with a thesis titled "A dataflow/von Neumann hybrid architecture".
He was first at IBM at the time of the mainframes, then at Exa Corporation, where he was a founder and Vice President of Product Marketing.
In November 1995 he joined Digital Equipment Corporation as Cambridge Research Lab Director, and then went on to Compaq as Vice President of Corporate Research when DEC was acquired by Compaq.
From May 2007, Iannucci was head of Nokia's Research Center heading laboratories in Beijing, Tokyo, Palo Alto, Cambridge MA, Cambridge UK, Germany, and Finland.
In 2012 Robert Iannucci became the Director of the Cylab Mobility Research Center at Carnegie Mellon University Silicon Valley.