I'm really hesitant to get involved with Kotlin since I think the big data industry is moving in a different direction language wise (?) but others on my team want to use it , wanted to get any alternative perspectives here

Had the same concerns as well, although I haven’t used clojure.. Been using Scalia for the last 3 years. In terms of big data, there was a switch to that because of spark mainly.. I used Kotlin in some projects and with spark as well. Now Java is still the key player in the field. If you are not using Spark and u don’t intend to go into deep functional stuff like using cats or zio for example, I would say that Kotlin is a better option. Writing Kotlin feels so much fun and I hope people start using it more and more in terms of server-side, big data etc.