Hartinger studied chemistry at the University of Vienna, earning his MSc in 1999 and his PhD in 2001 under Bernhard Keppler. He was an Erwin Schrödinger Fellow with Paul Dyson at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne from 2006 to 2008 and obtained his habilitation at the University of Vienna in 2009. In 2011, Hartinger was appointed the position of associate professor at Waipapa Taumata Rau, where he currently serves and in 2015 was promoted to professor.
Hartinger's research interests are in bioinorganic chemistry, medicinal chemistry, and bioanalytical chemistry, where he uses an interdisciplinary approach in drug discovery. He is specially interested in the development of metal-centred anticancer agents, particularly ruthenium anticancer drugs, and using analytical methods to characterise their behaviour in the presence of biomolecules.
Hartinger has now published over 169 publications and has an h-index of 69.
In 2022 Hartinger was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society Te Apārangi. The society said his "innovative approaches have established new directions in metallodrug research, and his developed methodologies continue to have far-reaching impact in the community. His findings challenge paradigms about the reactivity of metal compounds towards biomolecules and thereby inform the design of novel biomaterials".