A Cognilium venture (manager and product/editorial lead: Ali Ahmed). My role is the engineering: the database design, the data pipeline, and the directory app, not the venture, the scoring brand, or the editorial.
The obvious schema lets money tilt the rankings: add a sponsored flag, let it weight the sort. I put is_sponsored on the product but kept it out of every ranking query, and made the published score the exact sum of its declared parts, so paid placement can't move a rank and the number can't be fudged. On an unlaunched directory, deciding money never touches sort order is a trust decision encoded in the schema, not a prompt.