I work as a data scientist, I have worked in academia before jumping ship to industry where I am working with a largish ad tech pre-IPO company. I have a PhD in a quantitative science and am skilled up the wazoo. This is my first foray into industry though I have consulted before and that went fine.

So I joined in, and there is a Data Sciences group as well as a bunch of other groups. After a month of getting used to Data Sciences, I was dropped into another group which was just starting off doing something fairly exciting. This group has a 10 person or so engineering team, a couple of finance people, and some bizops guys. The person I report to is head of the Data Sciences group.

For reasons unclear to me, the person who heads the engineering team, does not seem to like me. If I need to get anything done, I would need to have at least some support from him because I am providing input to engineering decisions in the product being designed from things like what kind of data should be collected to thresholds to be chosen etc. There have been times when I had to just stand in front of his desk for like 4 mins (I timed it), just to get his attention from a social chat he was in. If I send emails they are just ignored.

I told my manager about this (not the standing in front of his desk part), and he said he does not want to intervene because it would undermine my authority. They should see me as the point person for everything related to Data Science. I was told not to cc him on emails either (because it would undermine my authority, which I don't seem to have either). He said I am senior enough so I should be able to get them to work with me. He works remotely, so is in this office only a week or so a year. I was recently uninvited from several critical meetings because 'they are for the core group only'. What are my options here? How do I change things? It is starting to get very frustrating here.