You may be using an incompatible Gradle and Android Gradle plugin version.
Upgrade Gradle to version 4.1 at least
in gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties
use:
distributionUrl=https\://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.1-all.zip
and in root build.gradle
modify the following lines (add Google maven repository and update plugin to 3.0.1):
buildscript {
repositories {
google()
jcenter()
}
dependencies {
classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1'
}
}