you'll need basic understanding of gradle, there is no way around it. You may get away with maven in Java world, but kotlin support for maven is a bit shaky at the moment. Especially if you're interested in scripting (which from my understanding is frequently needed in data field).
I suggest reading at least getting started guide:
https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/getting_started.html
Plus there are some good to know links from that portion of documentation. Also check out Gradle primer (available for both groovy and kotlin dsl APIs), there are links from the Getting Started guide. Overall gradle official reference documentation is quite comprehensive.
Regarding samples, head to github, there are a lot of examples available, both official - in gradle repository, - and from broader community.
Also there are some useful videos on JetbrainsTV youtube channel, including data-science stuff.
Also there are these relevant channels in this slack:
#science,
#datascience,
#scripting,
#gradle There may be more, look through the list, I'm only putting the ones I remember of the top of my head.
GL/HF as gamers put it 🙂