Romero Lubambo was born in 1955 in Rio de Janeiro, into a household already full of music: an uncle who played guitar lived next door and visited often, filling the house with American jazz and classical records alongside Brazilian ones. Lubambo tried classical piano for two years and gave it up, then picked up the guitar himself at thirteen, working it out largely by ear because there was no teacher close at hand. He joined a band and started performing professionally the following year, and from 1972 to 1977 he studied classical guitar formally at the Villa-Lobos School of Music in Rio. He completed an engineering degree in 1980, then chose music over it.

He moved to New York City in 1985 and worked first with singer Astrud Gilberto. The following year he met flutist Herbie Mann, whom he later called "my American father, my mentor for life," and the same year, 1986, he co-founded Trio da Paz with drummer Duduka Da Fonseca and bassist Nilson Matta, the group that would anchor his career for the next four decades. Mann built a New York-based Brazilian quartet around Da Fonseca and Lubambo for Jasil Brazz (1987, RBI Records), with bassist Paul Socolow and keyboardist Mark Soskin, and kept the pairing for Caminho de Casa (1990), his first album for Chesky Records. Mann later returned the favor as a guest on Trio da Paz's own Black Orpheus (1994, Kokopelli Records), the label Mann had by then founded himself.

Lubambo built one of the more extensive leader and co-leader catalogs of any Brazilian musician working in American jazz, recording steadily from 1990 onward for Chesky Records (The New York Chorinhos and The Tangos and Dances, both co-billed with composer David Chesky), GSP, Avant, and a run of Japanese-issued Aosis Records titles in the early 2000s. Shades of Rio (1993, Chesky) paired him in duo with the celebrated seven-string guitarist Raphael Rabello, and Lubambo (1999, Avant) was his first album billed to his name alone. He kept up parallel duo partnerships with major Brazilian pianists, including Duo (2002) and a 2005 three-disc box set, both with Cesar Camargo Mariano, and with singer Leny Andrade on the voice-and-guitar record Coisa Fina (1994) and its 2006 successor Lua do Arpoador; the two also performed together at the 2009 Umbria Jazz Festival in Italy. A long-running trio with saxophonist and flutist Mauro Senise, sometimes joined by singer and composer Edu Lobo, produced Paraty (1997), Todo Sentimento (2016), Dos Navegantes (2017), and Quase Memória (2019); Dos Navegantes won the Latin Grammy Award for Best MPB Album.

Trio da Paz kept working in parallel with Lubambo's own dates, recording nine studio albums between 1992 and 2016: Brasil From the Inside (1992), Black Orpheus (1994), Partido Out (1998, winner of the Jazz Journalists Association Award for Best Brazilian Jazz Album), Cafe (2002), Somewhere (2006), Harry Allen Meets Trio Da Paz (2007), Night of My Beloved (2007, credited to George Garzone & Trio Da Paz), Live at JazzBaltica (2008), and the thirtieth-anniversary album 30 (2016), which was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Latin Jazz Album at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards in early 2017. Duduka Da Fonseca's and Nilson Matta's own JazzProfiles.com profiles cover the trio's shared history in further detail.

Alongside his own catalog, Lubambo became one of the most in-demand guitarists on the New York jazz and Brazilian-music scene. His longest-running outside association is with vocalist Dianne Reeves: he plays guitar across each of the three consecutive studio albums for which Reeves became the first singer in any vocal category to win the Grammy Award for Best Jazz Vocal Album three years running, In the Moment: Live in Concert (2000), The Calling: Celebrating Sarah Vaughan (2001), and A Little Moonlight (2003), the last of which features him in two guitar-and-voice duets, "I Concentrate on You" and "Darn That Dream." He continued recording and touring with Reeves well into the 2010s and 2020s. His other credits include cellist Yo-Yo Ma's Obrigado Brazil (2003, Sony Classical), soprano Kathleen Battle's So Many Stars (1995, Sony Classical), Michael Brecker, Grover Washington Jr., Gato Barbieri, Paquito D'Rivera, Airto Moreira and Flora Purim, Ron Carter, and a guest appearance on four tracks of clarinetist Anat Cohen's Luminosa (2015, Anzic Records), where he also composed one of the tunes he plays on. Cohen returned the connection four years later, guesting on clarinet on Lubambo's own Quase Memória (2019, Biscoito Fino), the third album in his long-running trio with Edu Lobo and Mauro Senise. His most recent releases are Two Brothers (2023), a duo with guitarist Chico Pinheiro, Lembrando Garoto (2024), a tribute to the choro composer Garoto made with pianist Cristóvão Bastos and Mauro Senise, and Christmastime in Rio (2024), a holiday record with vocalist Pamela Driggs.

Lubambo's playing fuses the harmonic and rhythmic vocabulary of Rio's samba, choro, and bossa nova traditions with the vocabulary of American jazz guitar, moving between the two idioms rather than treating either as decoration on the other. His touch is percussive and rhythmically exact, a product of the samba and partido alto patterns underneath almost everything he plays, but it sits comfortably against hard-bop changes and inside orchestral string arrangements alike, which is part of why he has worked as easily with classical performers like Yo-Yo Ma as with straight-ahead jazz singers and horn players. Jazziz magazine called him "the best practitioner of his craft in the world today," citing his facility, creativity, and energy as being in "a class all their own." As one third of Trio da Paz alongside Nilson Matta and Duduka Da Fonseca, he helped define what a Brazilian rhythm section could sound like inside an American small-group jazz format over a partnership stretching from 1986 into its fourth decade.