Surely you can do this by adding this line in your gradle.properties file:
gradle=build -x lint -x lintVitalRelease
Warning: The above line will prevent running lint for both debug and release builds!
If you want to find out more gradle hacks, speedy builds, performance improvements, this will be the best slides you’ll be looking at: Mastering Gradle 3.0
I prepared this from a lot of different resources including Android Developer & Gradle documentation, Android Developer videos, etc – hope it helps! It really makes a huge difference in build times (incremental as well as project load time)