Can you setup user profiles that can be assigned to roles?

[Randy Jones]

The permissions in Jira are byzantine, but I think there must be a way to setup profiles that can be assigned to roles to make it easy to add internal and external client users. 

[Nic Brough -Adaptavist-]

It's not profiles, it's the roles themselves.  Each role should be used to define what a user in that role can do in the project.

If well designed then it's easy to say "stick user 1 in role A and user 2 in role B for this project" and have them be "internal" and "external" users.

You don't need "profiles", that's really what roles do already.