Professor Ramamoorthy's distinguished career traces back to the 1960s. In 1961, while working as a scientist for Honeywell, Ramamoorthy developed the entire microcode to handle instruction sequencing and control for the H290, Honeywell's first transistorized system. The H290 was a general-purpose, stored-program digital computer designed for process monitoring and control.

In the late 1960s, Ramamoorthy joined the University of Texas, Austin, as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, later becoming chair of the computer science department. He developed, with his students, the FACES System for automated test generation and evaluation techniques. These test techniques were successfully applied to discover programming errors in Bell laboratories Safeguard Missile Defense System for the US Army and were intended to defend Minuteman silos located around the US from enemy attack. In 1971, these techniques were modified for reuse at NASA's Space Shuttle Structural Test Facility in Huntsville, Alabama. At UC Berkeley, where he joined the faculty in 1972, Ramamoorthy is an emeritus professor of Electrical Engineering and computer science. Most recently, his research investigations have focused on service industries-functions, features, and control-and the relationships between software and service engineering. IEEE Society has honored Ramamoorthy's acheivements with the Taylor L. Booth Education Award in 1989, the Richard E. Merwin Distinguished Service Award in 1993, Golden Core recognition in 1966, and Tsutomu Kanai Award in 2000. He also received the IEEE Centennial Medal and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal. He has been an IEEE Fellow since 1978 and is a Fellow of the Society for Design and Process Science, from which he received the R.T. Yeh Distinguished Achievement Award in 1997.

A longtime Computer Society volunteer, Ramamoorthy was founding editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering and served as editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, He has published more than 150 papers, co-edited three books, and holds patents in computer architecture, software engineering, computer testing and diagnosis and databases. He holds two undergraduate degrees in Physics from India. He obtained two graduate degrees in Mechanical Engineering from University of California at Berkeley, and two graduate degrees in Applied mathematics and Computer Sciences from Harvard.