Actually yes, but you won’t find engineers compensated that way. Usually it’s the CEO. They will take a symbolic base salary (often they will say $1 but HR forces it to be minimum wage behind the scenes) and get paid with stock.

The trick is that it’s not RSUs, so not regular income. Instead it’s some form of option (I am not a tax attorney so I hesitate to state the type of option, there’s a variety of them that are used with different limitations). I believe they exercise 83(b) style to avoid AMT as well.

As usual, you need to already have a lot of money to make this work. Tax avoidance is amazingly accessible once you have enough money. One trick I could do, but don’t — my bank gives me a line of credit based on assets they manage for me. I could quit my job and easily live for years just using the LoC and report zero income other than passive income from rebalancing trades (which are very minimal).