Zadić was born in Tuzla, where she also attended elementary school. Her father was a university professor of electrical engineering, and her mother worked as a building inspector for the township. During the Bosnian War, the family fled to Austria with ten-year-old Alma Zadić. In Vienna, she attended the Ortnergasse elementary school and the Realgymnasium Ettenreichgasse. From 2003 she studied law at the Faculty of Law at the University of Vienna. In 2007, she graduated with a master's degree. She then worked at the International Organization for Migration in Vienna and as an intern at the International Tribunal for War Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague. In 2009/10, she completed her LL.M. at Columbia University in New York. She remained a visiting scholar and editor-in-chief in New York at the Vale Columbia Center on Sustainable International Investment. From 2011 to 2015, she worked as an associate, from November 24, 2015, to August 2017, as a lawyer and senior associate at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer (FBD), an international commercial law firm based in London with offices in 17 countries. She worked in a law firm in the field of conflict resolution. On the occasion of her candidacy for the National Council, she ended her work at FBD in August 2017 and had herself removed from the list of lawyers. In 2017 she received her doctorate in law from the University of Vienna.