After getting his PhD degree, Bal was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona, and at Imperial College in London. He then came back to the Vrije Universiteit as an assistant professor. Shortly thereafter he was awarded a 'Pionier' grant from the Dutch National Science Foundation, the most prestigious award then available to young researchers. He used the grant of 1.6 million guilders (about $1 million) to start a research group on parallel programming. In 1994 he became an associate professor and in 1998 he became a full professor. His work has continued to focus on cluster computers, parallel programming languages, and parallel applications.