Case Study: Kik cuts data engineering effort by 70% and doubles job speed with Databricks

Kik - Customer Case Study

Kik is a Waterloo-based messaging platform with about 300 million users, popular among teenagers and valued at over $1B. Rapid growth and a small engineering team left the company competing with much larger firms while struggling with scalability: disjointed data science tools, engineering choices that didn’t scale, and an overloaded Amazon Redshift setup processing 300 pipelines and ~5 TB of new data per day.

By moving to Databricks, Kik adopted a fully managed Apache Spark platform with multi-language support (including SQL), reliable pipelines into a data lake, and a collaborative notebook workspace. The change cut data engineering effort by 70%, halved runtime for large jobs, enabled instant notebook sharing instead of manual reports, and produced cleaner, more trusted data for analysis.

Kik

Joel Cumming

Senior Principal Data Scientist