Steno Software Engineer Interview: Questions, Experience & Prep (2026)

Steno is a legal technology company that builds software for court reporting, deposition management, and AI-assisted transcription. Their engineering team works on products that help law firms, court reporters, and legal professionals handle complex workflows more efficiently. With 27 open Software Engineer roles currently listed, Steno is in an active hiring phase and worth targeting if you have backend, API, or data-pipeline experience.

Candidates report the process typically includes a recruiter or hiring manager intro call, a coding assessment (take-home or live), and a technical interview with engineers. Some candidates describe a final culture or values conversation as well. The process is reported to be practical and conversational rather than purely algorithmic. You do not need prior legal industry experience, but showing genuine curiosity about how software can improve legal workflows makes a strong impression from the very first call.

These are the types of questions candidates at Steno commonly report encountering. Tailor each answer to your own real experience.

1. Walk me through a complex API or backend system you built from scratch. What trade-offs did you make?
2. How would you design a system that ingests, processes, and makes audio or video files searchable at scale?
3. Tell me about a time you worked closely with a non-technical stakeholder. How did you bridge the gap?
4. How do you approach writing code that other engineers will maintain and extend over the long term?
5. Describe your experience with real-time or asynchronous data pipelines. What tools or patterns did you rely on?
6. How would you handle a critical bug that is already affecting live users in production?
7. What is your approach to testing? How do you decide what to unit-test versus what to integration-test?
8. Steno's core product depends on high transcription accuracy. How would you design a feedback loop to improve a machine learning model that runs in production?
9. Walk me through how you would design a multi-tenant SaaS application where strict data isolation is required.
10. Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision made by your team. How did you handle it?
11. How do you keep up with new technologies? Give an example of something you learned recently and applied at work.
12. Describe a project where you had to balance shipping speed with code quality. What did you prioritise and why?

Q: Tell me about a time you worked closely with a non-technical stakeholder.

*Situation:* At my previous company, we were rebuilding the client-facing reporting dashboard. The product manager and sales team had specific ideas about what it should show, but they could not express their needs in technical terms.

*Task:* My job was to gather requirements precise enough for the engineering team to build from, while keeping stakeholders aligned throughout the process.

*Action:* I ran two structured workshops where I showed interactive wireframes instead of text documents. I translated every business request into a concrete data question and shared a simple mapping document with both the technical and non-technical teams. I also set up weekly check-ins to catch misalignments before they became blockers.

*Result:* We shipped the dashboard in six weeks with zero scope-creep surprises. The sales team adopted it immediately, and the product manager later asked me to lead requirements gathering for the next two major features.

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Q: Describe a time you handled a critical bug that was already affecting live users.

*Situation:* Three weeks after we launched a new billing integration, a subset of users started getting incorrectly charged due to a race condition in our payment webhook handler.

*Task:* I needed to stop new incorrect charges quickly, identify the root cause, and prevent recurrence, all while keeping the customer success team informed in plain language.

*Action:* I first added a feature flag to disable the affected webhook path, which stopped new incidents within minutes. I then added detailed logging, replayed historical webhook events in a staging environment, and isolated the exact race condition. I wrote a one-page incident summary before pushing the fix, which used a database-level lock to eliminate the race.

*Result:* We fully resolved the issue within four hours of detection. All affected users were refunded correctly. The incident summary became the foundation for a new incident-response checklist the whole team now follows.

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Q: Walk me through a backend system you built from scratch.

*Situation:* My team needed an internal pipeline to ingest and index thousands of documents uploaded daily by field agents. The existing process was a manual, error-prone CSV import that ran overnight.

*Task:* I was asked to design and build a scalable document ingestion system as the primary engineer, with a two-month timeline.

*Action:* I chose an event-driven architecture using a message queue to decouple ingestion from processing. Each uploaded file triggered a worker that parsed, validated, and indexed the document into a search engine. I also built a lightweight admin panel so non-technical staff could monitor and retry failed jobs, and I set up alerts for queue depth and error rates.

*Result:* The pipeline processed documents in near real-time instead of the previous overnight batch. Error rates dropped substantially compared to the old manual process, and the operations team could resolve most failures without engineering support.

Use STAR for behavioural questions. STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action, Result. Keep each part tight: one or two sentences on the Situation and Task, most of your speaking time on the Action, and always close with a concrete Result. If you do not have a number, describe the outcome in clear before-and-after terms.

For system design questions, follow this sequence: clarify requirements and expected scale, sketch the high-level components, explain data flow between them, identify bottlenecks, then propose how you would monitor and scale each part. At Steno, design questions often touch on media file processing or multi-tenant data, so think through storage, indexing, and access control explicitly.

For coding rounds, narrate your thinking out loud. Steno engineers are reported to care as much about how you reason through a problem as they do about the final solution. Start with the brute-force approach, state its time and space complexity, then optimise. Always ask clarifying questions before writing a single line of code.

For trade-off questions, show that you can weigh speed, correctness, maintainability, and cost in context rather than defaulting to one answer. Legal-tech products often demand very high accuracy, so be ready to explain clearly when you would choose correctness over speed and how your data would inform that choice.

Practical engineering judgment. Steno builds products where accuracy and reliability matter to legal professionals. Interviewers look for engineers who can explain why they made a design or architectural choice, not just what choice they made.

Clear communication across audiences. Because engineers at Steno work closely with legal professionals and court reporters, the ability to explain technical concepts in plain language comes up repeatedly, both in interviews and in the job itself.

Ownership mindset. Candidates who describe shipping something end-to-end, handling on-call incidents, or proactively improving a process without being asked tend to stand out. Steno is a growth-stage company, so they value people who do not wait to be told what to do next.

Comfort with ambiguity. The product roadmap at a company like Steno evolves quickly. Interviewers want to see that you can take an unclear requirement, ask the right questions, and still make forward progress.

Technical depth in at least one area. Whether it is backend systems, API design, data pipelines, or cloud infrastructure, come prepared to go deep on your strongest area rather than staying surface-level across everything.

Week 1: Research and foundation
Read Steno's website, product pages, and any recent blog posts or news. Understand what court reporting and deposition software actually does day-to-day and who the end users are. Review the job description carefully and map each listed requirement to a real story from your own experience. Refresh your understanding of REST API design, database indexing, and asynchronous processing patterns.

Week 2: Coding practice
Practise medium-difficulty problems focused on strings, arrays, trees, and graphs. Time yourself and practise narrating your thought process out loud, since Steno interviews are reported to be conversational. Write at least three complete solutions with tests, not just pseudocode.

Week 3: System design and behavioural prep
Practise designing a file processing pipeline, a search system, and a multi-tenant SaaS backend. For each design, prepare to discuss data isolation, failure modes, and observability. Write down five or six STAR stories covering ownership, conflict resolution, debugging under pressure, and cross-functional collaboration. Practise each story until it fits comfortably within two to three minutes.

Week 4: Mock interviews and final polish
Do at least two full mock interviews with a peer or via an online platform. Review your STAR stories one more time. Prepare two or three thoughtful questions to ask the interviewer about the engineering culture, current tech stack, and how the team handles production incidents.

Skipping the Result in STAR answers. Many candidates describe what they did but never close the loop on what happened. Always end with an outcome, even a qualitative before-and-after, or you leave the interviewer without evidence that your actions worked.

Going silent in coding rounds. Steno engineers want to follow your reasoning. Thinking quietly for several minutes before writing code signals poor communication, even if your final solution is correct. Narrate as you go.

Treating system design as a one-way presentation. Treat it as a conversation. Pause to check alignment, ask clarifying questions, and invite the interviewer to push back on your assumptions.

Not knowing the company's product. Saying you are not familiar with what Steno does in the first call is a fast path to rejection. Spend at least thirty minutes understanding how court reporting and deposition workflows work before any interview.

Overclaiming individual impact. If a project was a team effort, say so. Experienced interviewers notice when candidates say 'I built' for something that clearly required a team. Say 'I led' or 'I was responsible for' instead.

Ignoring testing and observability. For a product where transcription accuracy is critical, candidates who never mention tests, monitoring, or error-handling raise a red flag. Weave these naturally into your technical answers.