Steven has been active as a software engineer, entrepreneur and manager since 1983. He spent eight years with Cray Research in the 1980s and early 1990s. During most of the 1990s he spent time as a software architect, company founder, and executive for various networking startups, including Ascend Communications and Caspian Networks. He has most recently spent time working on large-scale software build issues for software vendors such as The MathWorks and VMware.

In 2000 his design for a next-generation software build tool won the Software Carpentry competition, leading to the founding of the SCons Project in 2001. Since then, he has spent considerable engineering time making SCons a better, easier-to-use build tool for large, cross-platform software projects, in no small part by coordinating and integrating contributions from more than 150 developers since the project's inception.