Following the release of Medicine for Melancholy and Humpday, Sanders was named one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces in Independent Film" in 2009. He worked at the Sundance Institute's Directors' Lab while editing his next project, the 2010 film The Freebie.[3] In 2010, he had a minor acting role in Tiny Furniture; he was friends with Lena Dunham, the film's writer, director and lead actress. Sanders also edited Mark and Jay Duplass's film The Do-Deca-Pentathlon, which was released in 2012, four years after it had originally been filmed.[4]
Sanders met Destin Daniel Cretton at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, and in 2012 Cretton hired Sanders to edit Short Term 12, a feature-length adaption of Cretton's 2009 short film of the same name.[4] In March 2014, Sanders won the Independent Spirit Awards' inaugural Best Editing award for his work on Short Term 12.[2] After Short Term 12, he edited Laggies, his fourth collaboration with Lynn Shelton, and the first season of Togetherness, an HBO series created by Mark and Jay Duplass.[4]