Having received multiple Academy Award nominations for Best Editor, William Goldenberg started his career in 1993 with biographical survival drama titled Alive, which is based on Piers Paul Read's novel Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors. He went on to win an Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Editing for a Miniseries or a Special - Single Camera Production for his work on the made-for-TV movie titled Citizen X, which is based on the story of a real-life serial killer who was evicted for killing as many as 52 women and kids between 1978 and 1990. His first Academy Award nomination came with the Al Pacino and Russell Crowe-starrer 1999 drama The Insider, which received seven Academy Award nominations that year.

He has been associated with other movies such as Coyote Ugly, Seabiscuit, Miami Vice, Gone Baby Gone, Confessions of a Shopaholic, and The Sorcerer's Apprentice. Goldenberg's most prominent work is considered to be Argo, which won him the Academy Award, ACE Eddie, and BAFTA Award for Best Editing along with many other nominations. His other project for the same year, 2012, was the political action-thriller Zero Dark Thirty, which also received widespread acclaim, winning him numerous nominations, including the Academy Award, BAFTA, and Critics' Choice. The acclaimed editor has also been associated with two installments of the sci-fi action Transformer series - Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Extinction.

His next project featured Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead, playing the role of the real-life British cryptanalyst Alan Turing, who decoded the German intelligence codes for the British government during the Second World War, in the 2014 historical drama The Imitation Game. The movie was both a critical and commercial success, winning several awards and receiving innumerable award nominations, including eight Academy Award nominations. His other projects include the 2014 war film Unbroken, the biographical sports drama Concussion, and Ben Affleck-directed Live By Night, and the period crime drama Detroit.