Ungerboeck received an electrical engineering degree from Vienna University of Technology in 1964 and a Ph.D. from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, in 1970. He joined IBM Austria as a systems engineer in 1965, and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory in 1967. He later joined Broadcom in 1998 as a Technical Director.

Among other honors, Ungerboeck is an IBM Fellow, a Fellow of the iEEE, a Broadcom Fellow, and ha won the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal (1994), the Marconi Prize (1996), the Australia Prize (1997), and a  1998 IEEE Information Theory Society Golden Jubilee Award for Technological Innovation.