After completing his PhD, Berlin held numerous research positions at the N. N. Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1978, he became a senior research fellow under supervision of Vitalii Goldanski and a lecturer in the faculty of Chemical Physics at the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology. In 1986, he was promoted to the position of the group leader and the head of the Laboratory of Non-Linear Physical and Chemical Processes. From 1986 until 1998, Berlin was a member of the Academic Council of the N. N. Semenov Institute of Chemical Physics.
In 2005, he became an elected member of the Executive Committee of the Miller Trust for Radiation Chemistry, UK. He also was an organizer, member of program committee and a co-chair of the Russian-French Seminar on Chemical Physics and a co-chair of the European Science Foundation Conference "Charge Transfer in Biosystems". In 1993-1994 Berlin was invited to teach PhD students and to perform scientific research in the Institute for Molecular Science in Okazaki, Japan. After working in Japan, he held the position of guest professor in Chemical Physics and Biophysics at the Institute of Theoretical Physics at Technical University of Munich (TUM), Germany. Following his appointment at TUM, Berlin joined the chemistry department of Northwestern University, where he is a research professor. Berlin was a member of the editorial boards of the scientific journals "Russian Chemical Bulletin", "Chemical Physics Report" and a guest editor of "Chemical Physics".