This sounds suspiciously similar to where I used to work, and was one of the reasons I left. Every project required working with 3-5 other teams for either help

This sounds suspiciously similar to where I used to work, and was one of the reasons I left. Every project required working with 3-5 other teams for either help or 'alignment' (aka approval). Getting a new service live required many tickets, meetings, manual edits to configuration by other teams, etc. I think large companies with low friction are the exception, not the rule. It takes MASSIVE amounts of work to build the infrastructure that thousands of engineers need (or be willing to spend millions of dollars for SaaS). I can think of only a few large tech companies with low friction (Google, Netflix, Meta), and they spend a lot on tooling. There's a few ways to deal with it. What I noticed was that the 'effective' engineers would avoid the standard process and be 'noisy'. They were comfortable asking directly via chat or in person for what they wanted instead of filing tickets or having meetings. They used their relationships (which they did work to build) to skip the line and save time. You also need some kind of perspective change at large companies. You've moved from rowing your own boat to a battleship. Process is there for protection from rogue employees wreaking havoc on the system, not to make you move fast. Think of it from a manager or platform team's perspective. How do you manage over 1,000 SSL certs (and renew them)? Prevent VM proliferation that needs to be accounted for and secured? Certainly it can all be automated, but at a BigCo's scale, that is a 4-5 person job, and that team is competing with other 'revenue generating' teams for headcount. I would also recommend to give it some time. You will adjust and learn over time how to work more effectively. I noticed after a few years that I could grease the wheels a bit because I had spent time cultivating relationships with various teams. Good luck!