Conte received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree in 1986 from the University of Delaware, his Master of Science in electrical engineering in 1988 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and his Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering in 1992 from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He started his career as an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina. In 1995, Conte moved to North Carolina State University (in Raleigh, North Carolina), where he was an assistant professor (1995–1998), then an associate professor (1998–2002), and finally a full professor of electrical and computer engineering (2003–2008). During the summer of 2008 Conte moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and took his current position as a joint full professor of computer science in the College of Computing and Electrical & Computer Engineering in the College of Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology. Somewhere in there (2000–2001) he took a short detour to DSP startup BOPS, inc. to serve as a manager of their back and compiler group and "chief microarchitect" (because they already had a "chief architect").