Podium's engineering team has evolved their tech stack from a monolithic Rails app to a microservices architecture running within Kubernetes, incorporating distributed data tools like Apache Airflow and Kafka. This shift has enabled the company to handle millions of conversations simultaneously, with Kafka becoming a foundational piece of infrastructure. By leveraging Kafka's streaming capabilities, Podium was able to upgrade their system performance and decouple their infrastructure, allowing them to "Ship It and See What Happens" while continuing to optimize for feature speed to market. The team has successfully implemented a data pipeline that aggregates messages from various sources and outputs structured data for Elasticsearch, enabling features like conversation search and review management. This approach has enabled Podium to scale well and provide messaging tools to local businesses, modernizing their communication with customers.