He was from 1987 to 2000 a professor at the Steklov Institute in Moscow.
In the 1990s he was also at Bilkent University in Ankara.
He is at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Stepanov is best known for his work in arithmetic algebraic geometry, especially for the Weil conjectures on algebraic curves.
Schmidt extended Stepanov's methods to prove the general result, and Enrico Bombieri succeeded in using the work of Stepanov and Schmidt to give a substantially simplified, elementary proof of the Riemann hypothesis for zeta-functions of curves over finite fields.
Stepanov's research also deals with applications of algebraic geometry to coding theory.
He was an Invited Speaker of the ICM in 1974 in Vancouver.
He received in 1975 the USSR State Prize.
He was elected a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012.