Stop the recursion two levels down

Constraints

1. 1Bound the walk in the recursive term, so the engine stops descending once it reaches the limit. Filtering the finished result would produce the same rows here and would still have walked all five levels to get them.
2. 2The VP herself is the anchor at levels_down = 0 and must not appear in the output — exclude her in the final SELECT, not in the anchor, because the walk starts from her.
3. 3A depth bound is also the standard defence against a cycle. A tree cannot loop, but a table that merely looks like a tree can, and an unbounded recursion over a cycle does not terminate.
4. 4Five people qualify: two at level 1 and three at level 2.
5. 5Order by levels_down, then employee_id.

Worked example

The anchor is the VP at levels_down = 0. The recursive term carries WHERE s.levels_down < 2, so it expands rows at level 0 and level 1 and refuses to expand rows already at level 2 — which is what makes it stop. The result is Eve Marsh and Farid Haddad at level 1, then Ivy Chen, Jonas Weber and Kira Novak at level 2. Omar Diaz, Priya Nair and Quinn Doyle at level 3 are never produced at all. Compare the two placements: WHERE levels_down <= 2 in the final SELECT returns exactly the same five rows, having first walked to level 5 and thrown six rows away. On a deep hierarchy that difference is the whole query cost.

What this tests

Where a bound belongs in a recursive query, and whether you know that a depth cap is also the guard against a cycle that never terminates.