Feeling stuck because of the unwanted office politics.

Seems like your manager is absentee and negligent. At the very least, seems like they are completely ignoring you as a remote employee. This is a tough position since it's clear you don't trust your manager at all (for good reason). Two pieces of advice:

• Can you cultivate relationships with others, e.g. your skip manager or other Staff Engineers who can advocate for the work you're doing?
• Since you're being iced out of projects, you should find opportunities in other ways. Try the Talk & Observe framework.

If and when your manager does get back to you, you should have a crucial conversation with them: [Masterclass] How To Work Better With Your Engineering Manager.

From my view, there's 2 levels you can work with:

• Your skip manager. Your manager doesn't seem available to provide the support you need, so the natural step is to go to their manager. Try to put time (or regular time) on your skip manager's calendar so you can sync on the state of the/your world. You could learn that your manager is also equally overwhelmed, and there might be opportunties to support them. At the very least, you will have a connection to someone who is directly accountable for your manager.
• Your teammates. If you have consistent teammates despite the project churn, I'd look to build relationships with them. While you are the owner of larger/efforts as a tech lead, that doesn't necessarily mean you're directly executing on everything (especially when your time is limited). These teammates can support you, and it's to you to gauge what they're capable of taking off your plate. Observe these teammates & try to gauge what scope of work they're able to consistently execute on in their day to day. I usually like to gauge my teammate's capabilities by directly working with them throughout projects and tasks: this way, there's lots of opportunities to directly observe and gauge their baseline of operating. If you don't have the time to do this, I'd guage this based on their levels.

Also, one thing to notice here is that any discussions around career progression etc. is out of the park.

Oof, this sounds rough - Sorry to hear this. Do you have a decent trove of stored up PTO? If so, you could use that to semi-brute force the interview grind and hopefully land another offer.

Now when it comes to figuring out your crazy work project, you need to take control. Here what you should do:

1. Make a single source-of-truth document that has everything. Try to make something like in my system design series: System Design Masterclass: Taro Playlists
2. Create a rough timeline for the project. After you have something there with milestones, you can work backwards on what needs to be done and exert pressure on relevant stakeholders appropriately
3. Hold a daily standup/situation room meeting where you go through the document and fill in missing pieces. Keep in mind that these could be very long initially (1+ hours)
   1. Try to kill other meetings. The goal is to consolidate all the random meetings into this 1 "super" meeting where all relevant stakeholders are together
   2. This is what we did when a major workstream (director/VP visibility) in Instagram Ads went off the rails
4. Do #3 until you feel like the workstream is in a good state

More good resources here: [Taro Top 10] Project Management

I'm happy to chat through this 1 on 1. Reach out to me in Slack, and I'll set something up.