Scientist

Profluent is the frontier AI lab for biology. Profluent builds powerful foundation models for all of life's molecules, unlocking solutions that transform medicine, agriculture, and beyond. Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Emeryville, CA, Profluent is backed by leading investors including Altimeter Capital, Bezos Expeditions, Spark Capital, Insight Partners, Air Street Capital, AIX Ventures, and Convergent Ventures and has raised over $150M to date.

Profluent is seeking a creative and enthusiastic Scientist II - Sr. Scientist to build and apply experimental workflows that characterize the specificity, safety, and developability of our personalized CRISPR base editing platform. This role will initially focus on establishing and scaling base-editor specificity workflows, including biochemical and cell-based approaches such as CHANGE-seq-BE and related methods for identifying DNA and RNA off-target activity. In the longer term, the candidate will spearhead off-target assessments for novel gene editing platforms such as engineered recombinases.  

The candidate will work closely with protein engineering, cell biology, bioinformatics, automation, and program teams to generate decision-quality datasets that guide editor design, candidate selection, and therapeutic program development. This person will be responsible for benchmarking assays, interpreting NGS-based specificity data, identifying limitations and opportunities across methods, and building robust workflows that can be deployed across editing modalities and disease-relevant contexts.

This is an excellent opportunity to shape how AI-designed genome editing systems are evaluated and advanced, and to work cross-functionally with a diverse team of experts across machine learning, protein engineering, cell biology, genomics, and gene editing.

Responsibilities 

• Build and lead Profluent’s strategy for base editor specificity assessment, with an emphasis on base-editor-relevant off-target discovery and validation workflows such as CHANGE-Seq-BE and related biochemical, cell-based, and targeted sequencing approaches
• Develop, optimize, benchmark, and apply orthogonal methods to evaluate editing specificity, including workflows for base editors, nucleases, and broader genomic integrity assessment across relevant experimental systems
• Design and execute studies to identify, prioritize, and validate potential off-target editing events, integrating assay development, NGS library preparation, sequencing QC, and data interpretation in partnership with computational biology and program teams
• Generate high-quality, decision-enabling datasets that inform editor engineering, guide/editor selection, delivery conditions, candidate nomination, and program development strategy