ak, get a head hunter and take 1-2 year IT contracts if you need to for the time being. My brother-in-law was an IT manager and dealt with this backstabbing issue with his job candidates all the time. They'd tell my BIL stories of how they lost their last contract job b/c a jealous, insecure coworker would undermine them in front of supervisors, sabotage their projects that they were assigned as colleagues on, and spread lies about their colleagues in order to promote themselves in a better light to upper management. Not much you can do to combat that other than be true to yourself, find an ally in an upper manager (leave human resources out of it -- their only agenda is to do what the company tells them; they view their workers as weak and expendable when said worker comes to them with an interpersonal complaint about another work colleague. In short, do not trust human resources despite what their name implies, it should be corporate resources as they do not give a **** about humans).