Sackur began working at the BBC as a trainee in 1986, and in 1990, he was appointed as one of its foreign affairs correspondents. As a BBC Radio correspondent, Sackur reported on the Velvet Revolution of Czechoslovakia in 1989 and the reunification of Germany in 1990. During the Gulf War, he was part of a BBC team covering the conflict and spent eight weeks as an embedded journalist with the British Army. At the end of the war, he was the first correspondent to report the massacre of the retreating Iraqi army on the road leading out of Kuwait.

In 1991, he wrote On the Basra Road: Scenes from the Gulf War (London Review of Books).

Sackur was based in Cairo, Egypt between 1992 and 1995 as the BBC’s correspondent in the Middle East and he later moved to Jerusalem in 1995 until 1997. He covered both the death of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the growth of the Palestinian Authority under Yasser Arafat.

Between 1997 and 2002, he was appointed the BBC’s correspondent in Washington and covered the Lewinsky scandal. He later covered the U.S. Presidential Election in 2000 and interviewed President George W. Bush. Sackur went back to Iraq in 2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein and was the first to report Iraq’s mass graves of victims of the regime. He was also the moderator of BBC’s worldwide broadcast of a debate on climate change with a panel of five world leaders from South Africa, the Maldives, Sweden, Australia and Mexico.

In 2005, Sackur replaced veteran journalist Tim Sebastian as the regular host of the BBC’s news programme HARDtalk. He has since interviewed prominent international personalities including President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, President Shimon Peres of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian National Authority, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, President Jalal Talabani of Iraq, Prime Mininister of Moldova Iurie Leanca, US vice-president Al Gore, former US Secretary of Defence Robert Gates. He has also interviewed leading cultural figures including Gore Vidal, Slavoj Žižek, Richard Dawkins, Noam Chomsky, Jordan Peterson and Vladimir Ashkenazy, as well as Annie Lennox.

Sackur was named “International TV Personality of the Year” by the Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) in November 2010.

In June 2017, Sackur was conferred with an Honorary Doctorate of International Relations (DIR) by the Geneva School of Diplomacy and International Relations, and in July 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Warwick.