After completing his doctorate, he was appointed as lecturer at the University of Southampton where he worked between 2004 and 2012, rising to the level of Senior Lecturer. Felix was appointed at Wits as Associate Professor in 2012 and became full Professor in 2015 in the department of Education Leadership and Policy Studies.

He has supervised 31 doctoral students to completion; one just started in February 2023.

Professor Maringe is extensively well published with 122 outputs including 13 edited and jointly authored books. His peer reviewed articles have been cited more than 5800 times and has a Google Scholar H-index of 32 and an i10 index of 55 indicating that 55 of his articles have been cited more than 10 times each. Three of his articles have achieved the status of classics after attaining more than 400 citations each.

He is an NRF rated scholar, an admitted Fellow of the South African Academy of Science and a Fellow of the British Higher Education Academy.

Felix is the current Editor in Chief of the Journal of Education Studies hosted at the University of Venda. With Tony Bush, Felix recently completed research on school leadership in Africa sponsored by the VVOB Rwanda. He is working on two competitive research grants currently; research on the internationalisation of Higher Education in public universities in South Africa, sponsored by the British Council and by the International Education Association of South Africa (IEASA); and the South African Council for Educators (SACE) grant on para-professionals in Education.