Raghava joined the Institute of Microbial Technology, Chandigarh in 1986 as a computer scientist and developer. He is also coordinator of the distributed information centre supported by DBT under the BTISNET programme, where his primary duty is to build and maintain infrastructure required for protein modelling and engineering.
He worked as a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford university as well as at the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Cambridge for two years (1996–98). During this period he learned and developed a number of web servers for application in computational biology, particularly in protein modelling.
Raghava developed a method for calculating concentration of antibodies and antigens from ELISA data, and he a prediction method for protein secondary structure prediction. In 1999 he established his research group at IMTECH with emphasis on protein structure prediction and genome annotation. In 2001, his group also focused on "Computer aided vaccine design" with emphasis on subunit vaccine design. Since 2006, his group is trying to integrate bioinformatics, chemoinformatics, pharmaco-informatics and clinical informatics in order to develop a single platform for designing drugs in silico.